


love and its decisive pain

by Handful_of_Silence



Series: how deep the sand [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: A Scenic Route of the Great British Countryside, Communication, Dealing With Trauma, Declarations Of Love, Domestic Fluff, Getting Together, Healthy Coping Mechanisms, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Minor Hurt Mostly Comfort, Or Getting Together Properly, People Using Their Words, Road Trip of Feelings, past trauma, soft things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-13 11:14:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18467803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Handful_of_Silence/pseuds/Handful_of_Silence
Summary: The cottage isn't going anywhere, Crowley reasoned. There was no need to rush these things.Or, before they settle down, Crowley and Aziraphale go on a road trip.





	1. London

It takes them a long time to walk around the house. Crowley surveys it with the carefully considering stroll of property developers everywhere, envisioning the laundry list of tasks to accomplish with a leisurely detachment. There is a churning sensation tumbling like an enraged washing machine in his stomach, almost identical to a swarm of nerves if not for the bold patina of delight that rewrites it as a giddy excitement. He looks at the splintered back window that could catch the morning sunlight, the lush and verdant garden it could look out on, the window sill that will be wide enough for the both of them to sit at. The key is still held firmly in his grip, imprinting against his palm.

He permits himself an allotted time of exactly one minute in which he's allowed to despairingly regret that he never kept the place up – dust hangs suspended in rooms that have lain empty, the winters that have sidled past like afternoon shadows have been unkind to the paint and the pipes and the walls. He doesn't get through his quota. It's difficult when the sunshine is so genial, when he is so boisterously happy. He watches Aziraphale's face instead. Aziraphale, whose expression is radiant with joy even if his smile is only a sapling thing, his eyes damp and brimming. Who is looking around, his focus narrowing with a rose-coloured lens; it's like he can't see any of the peeling plaster or the cracks beginning to splinter over the ceiling or the flags of spiderwebs that wave in the corners of empty rooms.

At some point, he leaned in, and self-consciously took Crowley's hand. He hasn't let go since. His palm dry, his hold gentle. He doesn't speak except for short interludes, looking rather overcome by the whole business, so Crowley fills in the silences sporadically, the could bes and might bes of this home of theirs, the blueprint he's been revising in his head for half a century on a fool's dream, shaken free of dust and finally seeing daylight.

The day is still warm, although it's been cut with some of the encroaching evening chill. They've found themselves in the space that one day might be a front garden. Aziraphale steps over cracked flagstones, holds a hand out to brush the heads of unruly weeds, the sticky chickweed that attaches weakly to the fabric of his trousers. There are bottles and cans and the evidence of old rubbish that's been chucked over the wall by passing litterbugs, but Crowley looks instead at the stiff leaves of nutsedge that have already started to flower, listens to the high-pitched cheeping of the swifts that have nested under the eaves somewhere.

Aziraphale finally sits down on the rotting bench that slouches against the wall of the house. Crowley joins him, but a little more cautiously, doubting it'll take their weight. There are some ominous cracking noises, but it seems to hold.

They watch a flock of starlings circle and swoop in the middle distance, a swarm breaking up the purpling sky. The sound is disorderly, scissors through the air with the insistence of a tantrum, and it takes a moment for it to subside entirely. Aziraphale sits demurely, straight-backed, one hand on his lap and the other warm in Crowley's. The onset of evening graces his face with the low light of sundown. Crowley observes him, reading the dark circles that have taken up lodgings under his eyes, the tension he hasn't quite shaken in his shoulders. He looks off at something Crowley can't be privy to. After a moment, he returns from wherever he's been, and meets his gaze with a small smile.

Crowley thinks, with a grim brooding more suited to night-time, of the man-shaped being next to him, that he both knows entirely and doesn't know at all. Of the weeks they've had each other back, the wearied rebuilding of something like it was before, compared to the decades they've been apart. They've barely spoken about it, those rasping years without each other, both of them sewn into their own private tapestries of doubt and hurt. Aziraphale sleeps nightly, the bedside light always on, turned onto his side but holding himself with crossed arms like a carefully laid corpse, his fingers dug into the skin of his shoulders. Crowley always knows when he wakes up, because he makes a mousy gasping noise, his face splashed with a dulled panic, and he suspects, although he can't confirm, that Aziraphale opens his eyes with every certainty that one day he'll be back in that place. Crowley still isn't sleeping apart from fitful little naps when Aziraphale's dozing, and there's a lining of paranoia in his waking hours that didn't use to be there, that he isn't dealing with as well as he should, a bone-scraping terror that he'll turn around and and Aziraphale will be gone again. He suspects that Aziraphale knows about this too. At some point they might talk about these things, but not yet.

At their back is a stalwart, half-crumbling monument to the future they could have, waiting for them to take it up.

The house isn't going anywhere, Crowley finds himself thinking, as he rubs his thumb over Aziraphale's knuckles. Surely there's no use rushing into things. They have time now, time they're slowly coming to terms with the fact they have.

Maybe they need a little time to themselves, after everything.

“What do you think about a road trip?” he asks to the raucous, over-grown garden, the flushed hum of the evening from birds and bees. Aziraphale doesn't move, but he knows he's heard.

“Where would we go?” he finally replies.

“Anywhere we want to,” Crowley says, warming to the idea. “Not forever. Just for a bit. Have a bit of a holiday together, before we settle down.”

“Like a honeymoon?” Aziraphale says. His cheeks burst into a bright red as soon as he says it, but he doesn't take it back, just straightens his back a little more and clears his throat.

“Yeah,” Crowley croaks, feeling a bit hot and bothered at the idea himself. “Yeah, something like that.”

Aziraphale considers for a moment. Crowley watches the side of his face, the way his lips curl up in a pleased expression, feels the hold on his hand tighten gently.

“I'd like that,” he says, and Crowley grins.

 

* * *

 

It's only a few hours from their village to the capital – because Crowley is quite firm on the fact that, if they're going to be driving all over the place, he wants to do so in his Bentley – but it's gone dark and there's been a brief flutter on rainfall by the time they arrive in London. Crowley had forgotten, after his years on the continents, about things like traffic build-up, always some roadworks or another bottle-necking the roads, even about congestion charges, so he takes the same approach he's always taken, which is to diligently ignore the facts of the road and do what he wants.

Aziraphale snuffles and blinks slowly into consciousness with a sharp breath. His eyelashes flutter in a sleep-stunned stupor, and Crowley doesn't have the heart to tell him that the seatbelt has left a wrinkled imprint on his face. He stares out of the window at the traffic lights, the signs for shops and restaurants, the gaudy window displays, the illuminations blurred and softened by the aftermath of rain on the car window.

“We're just passing the Barbican,” Crowley says in answer to Aziraphale's unspoken question. He turned the radio down when Aziraphale dropped off, and there's the muffled beeping of the ten o'clock news filtering through the speakers. “Remember when we last went there? When we went to go see... oh,what was it, the one with the... the one that was in _The History Boys_ , and we got ice cream and they only had strawberry left and you ended up eating mine anyway...”

Aziraphale's hard lines have gone soft in remembering. “ _One Man, Two Guvnors,_ ” he says after a moment of pondering. “We went to dinner afterwards. Some new place, just opened, I seem to remember it was very much your scene.” He makes a noise like an aborted chuckle, like he's recalling something amusing. “You liked the silverware so much you pocketed it.”

“No! I would never have...”

“The one with the silver gilt patterning,” Aziraphale continues. “Look at this marvellous style, angel, you said. I simply must have them, they're positively antique. Reminds me of my old townhouse, back when the mad king was around. You keep an eye out for the wait staff, and I'll just conjure up some copies, they'll never know the difference.”

“I wouldn't have...” Crowley insists again, but with a little less certainty. He has a faint recollection of those exact implements gathering dust in his old flat before he packed it all up and moved it into storage. He also has the rather confident memory of wanting to knick something just to see the slightly impressed, mostly horrified look on Aziraphale's face.

“Whatever you say, dear,” Aziraphale replies fondly, clearly not believing a word of it.

Crowley parks the car on some double yellow lines near Chancery Lane station, and they both step out and shiver at the nip in the air. Crowley immediately gestures his coat thicker, a red woollen scarf knotted neatly around his neck. Aziraphale shivers again and rubs his hands together, and doesn't make any effort at all.

“Give yourself a coat, angel,” Crowley says, and Aziraphale nods, and screws up his face, and there's the sound of air being shunted aside by something large and furry, like a suddenly displaced Saint Bernard.

Aziraphale's attempt at a coat could be called successful only if his aim had been to replicate the density and width of mammoth fur. As it is, his fledging attempt has caused his his whole body to look like he's trapped inside a furry brown bowling ball.

Crowley can't help but laugh. Aziraphale waves it away irritably, and looks defensive, his jaw tightening.

Crowley stops laughing. It's difficult, because he had looked ridiculous, but Aziraphale looks more annoyed with himself than Crowley, looking down at his hands with a hurt expression, like he expected better from his still clearly rusty powers.

He'll get trapped thinking about that sort of thing if Crowley lets it continue.

Crowley grabs his hand in his own gloved one, and pulls him along.

“Come on,” he says.

Things are a little more twenty-four hours than they used to be since they last walked these streets together. It strikes Crowley with an unsettling thump that it really has been a long time. Since before the Apocalypse. Before their stint at the Dowling residence. The fashions have changed and the great mass of humanity moves in greater variety, more colours, more differences. There is the chatter of at least ten languages he can hear at once. And here both of them still are, both of them looking a little out of time, people moving out of their way like a wordlessly parting tide. It's clear to both of them that they don't exactly fit here, not now, not like they used to, not yet.

The first thing Crowley does is pull a grumpy and ruffled Aziraphale, who is now resolutely not shivering only out of pride, to a little out-of-the-way shop claiming – in that gold lettered, upper class pedigree sort of way – to only sell the finest English heritage clothing. The shelves are carefully stacked with exactly what he expects; a variety of crisp muted colour shirts displaying a three figure price tag, a prim looking sales assistant giving them the side eye in the corner, a selection of Harris Tweed and Barbour and Hunters and all those other sorts of brands that appeal to the sort of people who either will never approach mother nature in her natural habitat, or the sort of people who need hard-wearing, but pricey outerwear so they can wander their estate suitably protected.

Aziraphale looks around with distaste, and appears to be about to snappishly complain, so Crowley acts quickly, and shoves an egg-white ribbed beanie on his head over his travel-rumpled curls, tugging it down over his ears beginning to redden with the chill.

“It's cold, angel,” he says in a no-nonsense way, already casting a judgemental eye over the other products nearby. For good measure, he grabs a merino scarf, a stately patchwork of cream, beige and grey-ish blocks topped off with a few refined tassels at the end. Satisfied, he crowds in, folding the scarf lengthways and wrapping it around Aziraphale's neck, putting the ends through the loop and pulling it snug around his throat to stave off the worst of the night-time weather. “So you don't complain all evening.”

Aziraphale doesn't look like he's about to complain. He fingers the soft wool gently, adjusts the hat further down over his curls.

“The hat's got a bobble on it,” he says nonsensically.

“They're in fashion now,” Crowley says. He's currently fighting a turf war with an overwhelming urge to buy Aziraphale a coat to go with it, wrap him so he's warm and comfortable and protected, and he's losing ground rapidly, the sensation blind-siding him. He doesn't want to admit to losing, so he doesn't meet Aziraphale's eyes as he pulls him over to the coats section. Aziraphale follows docile and unquestioning, and Crowley gets assaulted with a knock of comprehension that Aziraphale would probably let him pick out a whole assortment of clothes for him.

The idea makes him feel a little light-headed with power, and he restrains himself, asking Aziraphale if any of them take his fancy. Aziraphale makes a token fuss, 'gosh, my dear, they're all very expensive, aren't they', still rubbing the merino wool between his fingers, and Crowley waves those away with a reminder that money has never meant much to them anyway.

Aziraphale was always the one who wore clothes. Who collected them and loved them and wore them till they were decades out of style, fraying slightly, the colour dulling with use. And since he's gotten out, he's been wearing clothes like Crowley does, by thoughtlessly imagining them into being. And they're similar to what he used to wear, a good approximation, but they don't have the weight that they used to have, don't look comfortable like an old shirt really would, don't have the reality of sensation that a well-loved coat would. Aziraphale wears his imagined clothes out of necessity, not comfort, and Crowley wants to change that, reintroduce him with a few small reminders of his old pleasures.

Aziraphale's eyes stray on a particular item and Crowley takes it off the hanger before Aziraphale can change his mind.

He helps Aziraphale take his non-existent coat off even though he could in all rights vanish it away – the shopping assistant is rather beadily staring at them, making sure they don't pocket any of the cufflinks. He slots the coat over Aziraphale's shoulders – it's a few sizes less than he used to take, and there's a momentary pang of loss there – but Crowley comes back round to the front and brushes an errant piece of lint from the lapels. The overcoat is a tasteful oatmeal, co-ordinates nicely with the hat and scarf, and the buttons are an understated golden gilt that Crowley helps do up, before he steps back, surveying the finished piece.

Aziraphale has gone very quietly. He's looking right at Crowley with something thick in his expression, and there's a pink streak across his face like he's been scratched.

Crowley feels like he's being expected to speak.

“Looks good,” he says, even though that doesn't really cover it, not really.

He clears his throat, and adjusts the scarf around Aziraphale's neck. It's a more modern look than he would have worn, but there will be time enough for Aziraphale to wear these things out with use, to darn them when they fray and fuss when they get spotted with dirt.

“We best... best pay for these,” Crowley says, feeling one of them has to say something, and Aziraphale nods and rubs his fingers over the scarf again.

Crowley buys the things from the carefully disinterested shop assistant before he's overtaken by the urge to deck Aziraphale in anything else. He takes a bag for Aziraphale's old coat, knowing that it'll disappear once they leave the air-conditioned warmth of the shop but not wanting to explain. As they walk out, Crowley sees a black leather jacket that's sporting the sort of price tag that could buy him a whole herd of cows, and he makes sure to mimic it on the way out, pleased with himself.

They stroll for a few minutes aimlessly taking in the changed scenery. After a few moments, Crowley gestures at the long street of Tottenham Court Road.

“Do you want to go to the bookshop?” he asks. Aziraphale gives a discomfited glance, something like surprise in his face, like he hadn't even remembered that.

“I...” he starts, and he looks down, before sniffing and straightening his shoulders with a certainty. “I... no. Best not.”

Crowley doesn't understand, but he doesn't ask.

“Let's just take in the sights then, angel,” he says.

It's going well. Really well in fact. Crowley's not been back to London for years, and he soaks in the changes and the lack of changes, the heady crowds, the tourists, the babble of chatter in a hundred different languages, the rowdy students. He adjusts his clothes as he walks, picking and choosing the best of the fashions that he observes, shortening his hair to follow the current trend, and garnering the interested glances of a number of people passing by or standing outside drinking. Aziraphale has moved to take his arm, and Crowley feels oddly puffed up, proud, like he's showing Aziraphale off.

London is not a quiet city. It's not the small Welsh market town they've been hiding out in, it's not the cocoon of the hotel they've been sequestered in for weeks. And Crowley doesn't think, he doesn't think, but after a while of walking, chatting only to himself, he hears it. Harsh breathing, panicky like a moth under glass.

He looks, and Aziraphale has his eyes closed. Screwed shut, a grimace on his face that's tugging all the lines in to centre around his eyes, his mouth. His walking has become leaden, mechanical. He's pulling at the scarf like he's irritating the skin.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley asks uneasily, and there's a fraught shake of the head in response. His mouth tries to move but no words come out.

Crowley does the only thing he can think to do. He pulls them both off the main street, away from the noise and the crowds and the roads, ducks down side streets and along graffitied alleyways until they reach a residential street, a few bicycles tied against railings and a scooter parked up against a bollard. Curtains are closed at all of the houses with lights on, a sure sign of the national decline of the curtain-twitcher, and there are flickers of TVs and computers inside, but there's no people walking down the roads and that's exactly what they need right now.

“Hey,” Crowley says, and he does, he tries hard to keep the panic out. “It's alright... Aziraphale?” He feels awkward, his words unwieldy, and he doesn't know what to say because that would make this whole thing too bloody easy wouldn't it, that would be too much to ask of the universe.

Aziraphale still has his eyes closed tight like he's caught in the throes of a headache. He's pulled away from Crowley and has pulled his hat down to cover his ears, has cemented the job by keeping his hands there, pressing down. And Crowley starts to get it.

Carefully, he wraps his arms tightly around Aziraphale, rocking him slightly. Aziraphale pants and hiccups and tries to calm down, and Crowley murmurs sounds that Aziraphale can't process right now, hoping that this will be enough.

It takes several long moments for the outburst to recede. Aziraphale moves his hands away from his ears, opens his eyes and suddenly looks mortified with embarrassment, realising what just happened.

“You forget how in-your-face this city is, don't you?” Crowley remarks softly, as though he hasn't just watched Aziraphale have some sort of breakdown in the middle of the street. “It's a lot to take in, after everything. It's a bit much.”

After a beat, Aziraphale nods miserably. He leans his head against Crowley's shoulder as though the weight's too much for him right now, and Crowley continues to hold them together, hoping that this helps.

“You ok?” he says after a while.

Aziraphale doesn't say yes, but he doesn't say no either. Crowley can work with that.

“I think there's a little pub round here,” he ventures. “Out of the way, pretty quiet. Doesn't even have a TV. It might even still be there. Want to check it out?”

A nod.

The pub is miraculously still there. The door's been repainted, and the place has clearly changed names and ownership judging by the sign, but the carpet's still scuffed and worn as they push the door open.

They sit down at a corner table even though they have their pick in the mostly empty place. Crowley gets himself something stronger than his usual, and Aziraphale shakily downs his water so fast he almost spills it down himself.

A closed off look is beginning to migrate onto his face. It's a familiar look, and Aziraphale has ever been a creature of habit. If there was anything uncomfortable that he didn't want to talk about it, he'd follow the grand old tradition of pretending that it didn't exist, stiff upper lip and bullishly ignoring it in a carefully layered series of mental repressions. Crowley gets it, he does. He can't help feeling a little disappointed that Aziraphale doesn't trust him more, but this isn't about his fragile ego, not really. It's about Aziraphale being able to confront reality, and maybe he's not ready to talk about what just happened.

Crowley is shocked then, when Aziraphale finally mumbles out a “I'm terribly sorry about that, my dear.” He stares at the icebergs at the bottom of his glass, at his nails, fiddles with the cardboard coaster advertising a local brewery and rips little bits out of it. “I don't quite know what came over me.”

They both know exactly what it was. Aziraphale had spent decades, trapped and alone. In a space barely three strides across. There was no light, no sound but the curse of his own breathing, and now, coming back to a city like London... it'd be enough to overwhelm anyone.

“No worries,” Crowley says. “My feet were getting a bit tired anyway.”

And it's another lie, easily spoken, too easily, and maybe how that's how they're going to play this, bricking up their unspoken terrors and shames with bold falsities in the hopes that they won't be called out on it.

Crowley doesn't want to do that.

“It will likely happen again,” he says, matter of factly. He takes a large mouthful from his glass, and looks at Aziraphale. “We'll deal with it. You don't have to be... I don't know... embarrassed or something, angel. You aren't doing this alone.”

“But I should be...” Aziraphale starts, frustration lacing his words, and Crowley can see the whole pathway of this conversation before they even set foot on it. I should be over this, he'll say. I should be stronger, I should be better, I should, I should...

“There's no timeline for this, Aziraphale,” he says, not unkindly. “We've... we've both been through a lot. And that's not just going to go away because we're back together. So there will be bad days. But I think... it's best we're honest. And we weren't always great with that sort of thing, but I want... I want us to try.”

“OK,” Aziraphale says. “We'll try.”

His hand is on the table and Crowley takes it.

Aziraphale looks at him, and he doesn't know what he's looking for, but he must find it, because a smile grows on his face. Crowley told him it would be OK, and he trusts him wholeheartedly, so he believes him. It's as simple as that to him, in a way few things are. He glances at their glasses, and Crowley's drink becomes a well-aged red, with Aziraphale's glass filling up and following suit. It's the first thing he's drank that hasn't been water and tea.

He holds out the glass with the hand that's not in Crowley's.

“To our road trip,” he says.

Crowley chinks their glasses together and wonders what he did to ever deserve this.


	2. The Chilterns

The Bentley is parked in exactly the same garage as he left it, tucked away in an old lock-up near Old Spitalfields Market in the East End. The security guard regards him with a little too much interest, the magpie glint of someone wily noticing something he shouldn't have, as Crowley gives proof of ID and shows the key fob he's been carting around in his pocket since he deposited the car here.

“Ere,” the man says, fixing Crowley with a measured look. He has the kind of voice that can give an rakishly angled eyebrow raise. A look that says he's seen most things during his reign as head of security in this establishment and as such no nonsense will be boded between the hours of 10pm and 8am around these parts. “You look just like the geezer what originally had this place.”

“Family resemblance,” Crowley lies smoothly.

The security guard rewards this with an unimpressed look.

“You couldn't have tried for a better excuse?” he scoffs, sounding almost disappointed in Crowley, and hands his ID back.

The reason for his nonchalance can be easily explained. The first and most central reason being that this man was a Londoner. His great-grandparents arrived off the ferry from what was then Eastern Pakistan, and something in the air of the city, like it had done for so many new arrivals, inured something in them, tempered a city-ish capability that was passed down in the blood like a slightly discoloured heirloom; these capabilities were, namely, an innate ability to weather almost anything with a bit of a moan, a generalised mistrust of the public transport system, and the capacity to chug down the sort of over-milked brown gritty slush people on the continent would not deign to call coffee. London is an odd, old city, with odd, old habits and plenty of things that don't add up. This would just be another one.

The second reason, is this man, Roy Rabindranath Begum – named for both the famous Bengali writer (his mother's choice) and the captain of Man United from 1997 to 2005 (his father's) – had worked enough odd jobs and night-shifts to only count this occurrence as the fourth most unusual thing he'd encountered. In comparison to that strange woman who kept garage eighty two, and whatever was being kept in forty four that politely only made moaning noises between eleven and midnight, this un-aging stranger was rather uninteresting in the grand scheme of things.

(Roy catches a glimpse of the stranger's yellowed eyes as the flash bastard wanders away from the security booth with the bundled-up looking bloke he came in with trotting along behind him, and wonders without much real interest if they're contacts or not.)

Crowley's key screeches in the lock. It stinks of mould and stale air and Aziraphale waves the dust away with a cough, but Crowley approaches the vehicle with a light step, reverently.

He makes the sort of cooing noise some men make when talking to their cars as they buff the hood to a gleaming shine, the sort of car owners who think applying designer hubcaps or personalised number plates are acceptable uses of their allotted time on Earth. Crowley's attitude of firm, slightly sadistic, love – so rigidly applied to his terrified plant life – does not extend to his car. Everyone who has ever owned a car knows tough love will only get you so far, and that a time-honoured, more sensible strategy to adopt, when the engine splutters or the fuel gauge is dangerously swinging towards empty, is a bit of unashamed begging and grovelling encouragement. Crowley has never had to revert to this strategy, because he and the Bentley have an Understanding, but nonetheless, he dotingly waves the rust flakes off like dandruff to expose a gleaming hood, untouched and undamaged paintwork surfacing like an island rising above a dusty sea-level. In return, the car busily and very quickly slips into something more appropriate for the occasion. The wheels bubble up from where they've sagged like loveless balloons, the fuel tank is refitted seamlessly into an electric system (there hasn't been a petrol station in operation for years now) and the bumper evicts the spiders that have been living behind it, to their displeasure and calls for the union to have a word about this.

Crowley opens the driver door carefully, listening for the click as it opens, feels the leather give as he settles into it.

Aziraphale gets into the passenger seat next to him.

“My dear?” he says timidly, and Crowley comes to be aware that they've been sat motionless for a few minutes.

It's like time hasn't changed. Like they're just heading out for a drive. The last time Crowley was in this car – well, sort of this car, if one looked at it sideways and with a slight ontological squint – with Aziraphale, they had been driving back from Lower Tadfield. Aziraphale had had Agnes' book in hand, absent-mindedly getting out of the passenger seat, and Crowley had been trying unsuccessfully to not worry about the fact the world was going to end.

“Just thinking,” he says lightly, flashing a smile at Aziraphale and hoping it sticks. “Missed the old thing.”

And then he puts the car into gear – even if the rest of the world has been lured by the false promises of the automatic shift, he still has standards – and they glide out into the just-breaking morning.

He takes turn-offs at random. He doesn't have anywhere he wants to go. He gets comfortable in the driving seat, feeling the world righted from a tilted angle, the car rumbling beneath him, the morning looking to be set for a bright, clear day.

Aziraphale taps his arm, and holds out a packet of boiled sweets that he pulls from one of the pockets of his new coat.

Crowley blinks.

“Where'd you...?”

“I got them from the vending machine while you were returning the rental car,” Aziraphale explains.

Crowley beams as he looks at the paper wrapped things he can't stand the taste of, the sweets that only old people and Aziraphale are propping up the market for, and he gives a devil-may-care grin that doesn't go any way to disguising his fondness. He pops one in his mouth. It's lemony, and they aren't, he concedes begrudgingly, as bad as he remembers.

Aziraphale's made a good dent in the blackberry ones by the time they start getting to the outskirts.

“M1 or M4?” he asks Aziraphale, forgetting for a moment that the angel never learned to drive and fully deserving the stumped look he gets in response.

“I wouldn't presume... perhaps because you're in the driving seat...?”

“One of them any day now, angel.”

“Oh goodness. M4 then.”

Crowley nods and then executes a perfectly timed, definitely illegal lane change. Aziraphale clutches the dashboard, figures this is next to useless, and goes for clutching the grab handle to his left instead.

“My dear!” he exclaims, disapprovingly, and Crowley just laughs and tips over the speed limit to hear him squawk indignantly and call him a 'terror' before going into his pocket to hand him another lemony sweet.

Crowley drives for a while along the motorway before he decides to turn off, not quite fancying carrying on to Slough and Maidenhead. Instead, he angles up the country, the scenery becoming less marked with industrial endeavours the further they go, becoming more picturesque, passing blinding yellow fields of rapeseed, the big curious eyes of cows that watch them go. Aziraphale's pulled down the visor to shield his eyes from the ascending sun, but even he hums and suns himself in the morning glow, tapping his fingers along to the music and asking Crowley if this is the sort of bebop that the young ones are listening to these days. He sounds as blasé and clueless about it as ever, and Crowley wonders whether to tell him that the young ones brought back the gavotte about twenty years ago and set it to dance music when trance came back into fashion.

After a while, they hit the sloping chalky fields of the Chilterns. They pass great sweeping pastures enclosed by wire fencing, roaming herd of sheep, their painted identification marks providing a mindless topic of conversation as they try to distinguish which farmer (blue squiggle on the rump or reddish line on the neck) owns what flock. They drive through little market towns with squat sandstone buildings, past ramblers with heavy packs who are already sweating in the sunshine. Aziraphale points out a bird of prey that they both watch soar and dive to grab at something in the hedgerows, and the debate as to whether it was a red kite or a buzzard occupies a solid twenty minutes of ornithological disagreement.

They see a sign for a National Trust park, and Crowley's beginning to feel peckish, his mouth dry and sticky from all the lemon sweets. He leaves the main road, and eventually finds a gravelled spot to park up near the Visitor's Centre. Aziraphale gets out of the car, stretching out his body, and looks loath to take off the coat, hat and scarf he's been adorned in since London. He'll boil in that sort of clothing however, and Crowley tells him as such in slightly more blunt a fashion, and Aziraphale nods mournfully, and takes them all off, folding them all circumspectly to sit in the back seat.

Crowley looks around for food, and figures they might find something of interest in the Visitor's Centre; probably a little cafe, a small selection of overpriced sandwiches or something. Together, they have an idle look at the gift-shop, and this turns out to have been a mistake: Aziraphale fawns over a series of fridge magnets with a variety of wildlife related puns, clearly taken with them, drawn particularly by the _Bee happy!_ magnet with a smiling, waving cartoon honeybee and the sickeningly twee picture of a doe and buck stylised around an _I love you deerly_. Crowley flat-out refuses when Aziraphale makes a suggestion about buying them for their kitchen – although his heart does a funny little flop when Aziraphale calls it our kitchen – although he expresses an interest in the grumpy cartoon fox coiled around a _For Fox Sake_. Aziraphale sniffs and says he doesn't approve of such coarse language.

After a few moments, Aziraphale is lured in by the book section, and Crowley ambles over to the front desk, hands in pockets and studying the various booklets for different tourist destinations nearby.

“Anything take your fancy, dear?” the woman on the till – who clearly shares Aziraphale's abysmal sense of taste, and has the pin-badge versions of those kitsch magnets decorating her lanyard. Crowley particularly despises the additions of _Stop badgering me_ and _What a hoot!_ (complete with a smug little tawny owl).

“Just browsing,” Crowley replies. “Not really been round this neck of the woods before.”

“Up from the city?” The woman seems delighted to have found a Londoner to convert to the wonders of the great outdoors. “I would definitely recommend going on one of the bluebell walks. They're just coming into season, beautiful views. And we aren't too busy, what with it being a weekday, so you wouldn't have to deal with people talking selfies all the way along the route. A nice steady afternoon walk, nothing too strenuous.”

“Hmm,” Crowley says, finding himself quite taken by the idea of wandering in nature with Aziraphale, even though they're both city-dwellers at heart, and it won't take long before they complain about the midges that will no doubt zero in on them. “I'll ask my partner. He might be...”

He turns to shout over to Aziraphale but Aziraphale isn't there.

“Aziraphale?” he says, frowning, and making an 'excuse me' gesture to the woman, wanders over to the gift-shop book shelves, finding only a couple glancing over local history books.

There is something sick and clawing in his chest as he looks around. His heart is beginning to rise up his chest like a flood line. He marches over to the other side of the gift shop, looking near the postcard columns, the boxes of themed stationary, his eyes flitting anxiously.

 _He's probably gone back to the car,_ he thinks belligerently. _Gone to get his scarf or something, he's fine, he's fine, he won't thank you for fussing like this, for someone's sake, pull yourself together._

It's easier said. Aziraphale isn't in the car park, and he isn't by the car. And despite his best intentions, Crowley's anxiousness is evolving into a fully-fledged storm system of panic.

“Aziraphale?” he says again,casting his eyes around the car park, and his voice has gone feeble, strangled in terror. He doesn't even shout it, because what would be the point, because he _knew_ this would happen, knew if he turned his back for an instant he'd lose him all over again. And he's letting out a quaking breath that's climbing up a multi-step program from tremulous nerves to absolutely losing anything left of his cool in the middle of this National Trust car park, and he presses his hands to his eyes, and this can't be happening, god, he can't go through this again.

Maybe Heaven took him after all, he thinks feverishly, a hot bolt of terror driving through him, maybe he just disappeared like last time, taken by forces outside of their control, and Crowley's had fifty years alone so who was he kidding to think he could have a happy ending, he shouldn't have trusted it, god he'd been so _stupid..._

“Crowley?”

Aziraphale's behind him, looking bewildered, his arms full of foodstuffs he's clearly just bought from the cafe. He's dropping them without consideration, striding towards him, and Crowley's trying to wipe away the wetness on his face and snarl angrily at Aziraphale for being so _thoughtless,_ for frightening him like that, _anything could have happened to you, angel_ , but failing in both when Aziraphale looms into his space, making a cavern of their bodies, his palm over Crowley's chest, telling him firmly to breathe, to calm down, dear boy, everything's alright.

“Where were you?!” Crowley hisses, blisteringly furious, but that's easier than calming the clanging in his chest, at clearing the cold that's splintered over him like a sudden frost. “You were there, and then... Don't _do that to me_.. .I thought... for ssssssomeone'sss sssake Aziraphale, you could have been...” His mouth snaps shut, because he can't say it, and he bites his lower lip. Aziraphale didn't mean it, of course he didn't, but that wasn't the point.

He'd held on, all those years. He'd believed in the same way drowning sailors believe in the life preserver they're clutching to, and he'd held on with unremitting certainty as the years waned and the buoy became flimsier. He hadn't believed because the world was fair, as that was provably false by a number of obvious counts, or because he followed some meaningless affirmation that things would ultimately turned out well in the end, as that was a load of placatory nonsense thought up by the same sort of people who said suffering made you stronger, who said there was a reason for everything to happen. Nothing about what had happened had been imbued with some secret meaning, he wasn't stronger because he went through it, it had been hard and it had hurt and he'd spend most of his time not searching drinking with the sort of reckless commitment to not see sobriety catch up with him. No, he'd held on because he believed deep down that somehow he was owed something by the universe, because it was either that or admit he was lost, that he had nothing, he'd lost everything, that he'd failed.

And he couldn't do that again. He couldn't bear it.

“Oh my dear,” Aziraphale says, distraught, a horrendously patterned handkerchief suddenly in his hand that he uses to dab at Crowley's damp face, wipe at his eyes. “Oh my dear boy, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” His eyes are prickled with a horrified guilt. “I thought... dear me, it was just a... I didn't even think, I'm dreadfully sorry.... I thought we could have a picnic you see, and....”

He trails off, devastated at his mistake, clearly wanting to reach out to Crowley but not knowing if his gestures would be rebuffed.

Crowley's anger dies flameless, although his terror endures like embers in his chest. He feels ashamed, embarrassed that Aziraphale saw him like that. But Aziraphale doesn't look judgemental. He looks worried and upset with himself, his hand still hovering over Crowley's heart.

“OK,” he says. He breathes in, and meets Aziraphale's distressed gaze. His stupid treacherous body continues its feverish mantra but looking at Aziraphale helps him turn the volume down. “OK.”

He adjusts his lapels, cards his hair back, and nods to himself. He might be an emotional wreck, but at least he looks stylish. He tries to communicate to Aziraphale that their next course of action should be to move past this; not forget about it, but just. Postpone discussing it for a while until Crowley stops feeling like he's about to scream.

Aziraphale nods and he must pick up something. He comes round to Crowley's side, presses a hand briefly against the small of his back.

“Let me tempt you to lunch, dear boy,” he says, and the foodstuffs are back in his arms. He gestures with his head to the picnic tables over to the left of the Visitor's Centre.

Their impromptu lunch is conducted on a wooden picnic bench, the top of which Aziraphale primly brushes with the slightly sodden handkerchief to clear wayward crumbs. Crowley sits down first, adjusting the umbrella over the table to shade them from the sun now every much mid-day. Aziraphale deposits the pile of things he bought like a hunter returning with his horde of treasures, and then produces two little travel bottles of wine that are slick with condensation from his pocket. He gives a little weak _tah-dah_ , shaking them like he's revealed Crowley's card from one of his magic tricks. After a pause, he sits down next to Crowley rather than opposite. Their knees knock together, and Aziraphale opens the first packet, a ploughman's sandwich a little squashed from being dropped, and giving half to Crowley.

Crowley takes it, and maybe his hands are still betraying him, and maybe he's stained by the memory of panic, but he smiles at Aziraphale, and it reaches his eyes, and that matters, that matters.

Aziraphale presents the contents of all the food packets like he's personally delivering Christmas, and he keeps up a mindless patter of words not because he wants to talk but because Crowley needs it, until Crowley banishes the final ghosts of his panic, and joins in, stepping in to join the rhythm of Aziraphale's conversation.

Despite the rocky start, the afternoon plays out kindly. They spend an hour dining on their mini feast, letting the warm weather sink into their bones, Crowley leaning sun-dozy against Aziraphale. If anyone from downstairs was minded to pop up to give him a drop-up inspection (although demons are notoriously paperwork-shy, and Crowley would likely be expected to fill in the relevant report himself), he would be getting a sternly-worded write up for his most un-demonic crimes of lunching with an angel, smirking at an angel's jokes as though they were amusing (most angels being infamously humourless or tickled only by Doctor, Doctor jokes), and worst of all, permitting a footsoldier of the divine army to tempt him into buying two childish fridge magnets of a bee and a fox.

Crowley, being a demon, also values the twin skills of a) knowing when to pick his battles and b) know how to use his wiles to his advantage. As such, he's got a Twister out of the whole thing, having made meaningful eyes at the ice-cream van and indicating without speaking that it would be wonderful if Aziraphale could go and get him one.

Although he's loath to move, perfectly comfortable leaning against Aziraphale all afternoon, Crowley mentions the walk the woman had told him about and Aziraphale, finishing off his own ninety-nine cone, licking the dripping raspberry syrup off his fingers, takes to the idea, and then it's decided.

After disposing of the rubbish in the suitable bins, they follow the signs to the right of the Visitor's Centre, taking the foot-beaten path that after a few minutes veers from trimmed meadow into a wooded area, the great backs of beech trees arching over the path and breaking up the sunlight. Aziraphale seems content to admire the large obelisk-shaped monument from a distance, forgoing reading the plaque which is likely dedicated to some past military victory or another, and they continue, avoiding muddier patches of the route, nodding at any walkers they see going in the opposite direction as they follow the arrows of the path, listening to the chirrup of the birds in the trees and hedgerows.

They're walking so sedately, their surroundings so peaceful, and Crowley is wondering if it would be so bad if he sat down, if they dozed right here against the trunk of his old chestnut, if he could slip into something more comfortable and recall what it feels like to have the sun on his scales, when Aziraphale presses his arm.

“Oh, Crowley, look,” he breathes.

Crowley follows the line of Aziraphale's fingers. Up ahead on the path, more beech trees sprout up from the ground, providing a density to the woods. Carpeting the ground between each one are bluebells, stretching as far as they can see. There were pockets here and there that Crowley had noticed as they walked, but these are spread out like a purpling carpet, a sea of delicate faces turned up towards the sun, almost crowding onto the path.

“It's beautiful,” Aziraphale says. His hand soft in Crowley's. His face wowed with delight, sun-blemished and beaming. There isn't a shadow on his face, not here.

Beautiful, Crowley thinks, looking at Aziraphale.  
  


* * *

 

They tarry leisurely in the Chilterns for a while. When they get back in the car to continue their journey, Aziraphale's bought a little touristy guidebook for the area to go with their magnets, and he slowly reads out little sections that pique his interest. He prefaces each of them with a variation on 'Oh my dear, look at this,' and Crowley is warmed by every version, and wonders why it took the world ending for them to think of doing this together.

That being said, Crowley hums non-committally to most of the suggestions, because all of Aziraphale's choices are rather predictably old country homes of some aristocrat or another, which always seem to play host to things like the largest collection of antique wooden spools, or medieval cooking cauldrons, or in one case, the most extensive collection of embroidered bed linens in Northern Europe. Crowley treats these with the same respect he'd given to the symposium on bookbinding and restoration that Aziraphale had once invited him to at King's College, with a polite but clear indication that was Not Him and wasn't likely to become Him anytime soon. Aziraphale, to his credit, shakes off each refusal like water off an umbrella, and Crowley would swear Aziraphale was deliberately choosing the most esoteric and dull sounding offerings just to rile him if the angel's face wasn't an open picture of perfect(ly suspicious) innocence.

There are a few grandly landscaped manor gardens that Crowley quite fancies and a few tea-shops that come highly recommended with effusive reviews as to the quality of their patisserie. They stop in one of these quaint market towns for a cup of tea, and it must be a good day, because Aziraphale takes two sugars in his tea and even eats half the Bakewell tart Crowley's ordered out of habit, Before they leave, Aziraphale makes darting, obvious eyes at the charity bookshop. Crowley pretends to be put out, and follows him in while he peruses their limited stock.

What does prick up Crowley's interest as they drive is a sign for the Hellfire Caves, and he diverts them to High Wycombe with grand stories of the things he used to get up to in the good old days.

“Oh, it was positively bacchanal, angel, you would have hated it. Full of rich toffs playing paganism and getting slaughtered. You know,” he says offhandedly. “I met Benjamin Franklin. Tempted him into a few compromising situations with the ladies, if you catch my drift.”

Aziraphale raises an eyebrow, managing to indicate a great many things in that. Aziraphale is not a prude by any means – Crowley knows exactly what sort of things they spoke about and from the rumours, put into practise in those members only gentlemen's clubs and invitation-only dinner parties for the poets and aesthetes of the decade – but he's not one to brag about it, meaning Crowley has to do the job for both of them.

“I went once,” Aziraphale says, almost thoughtlessly.

“No!” Crowley's smile doesn't fit on his face. “You?! _Angel!_ ”

“I knew a few of the brothers from some of the literary circles,” Aziraphale says defensively, his pride clearly dented by Crowley's disbelief. “And they would talk about these gatherings they'd have, that I simply must go, and then one of them invited me and well, it would have been terribly rude to refuse... And it was all so silly, what with the chanting and the ridiculous customs, so I gave my cloak to one of the rather chilly young ladies and just sampled some of their rather fine sherries instead.”

“ _Angel_ ,” Crowley says again, delightedly. “How did you square that with Upstairs?”

“I told them I was taking a front-line approach to drawing souls back to His Grace,” Aziraphale replies frostily, and it takes a few minutes for Crowley's belly-aching laughter to die down.

“Just when I think I know you,” he says, and Aziraphale's defensive posture deflates and he chuckles.

“You do know me, my dear,” he replies with a doting tone, and if Aziraphale's ability to sense great swathes of emotion is uncorrupted, Crowley must be letting off great quantities of Love in heady tidal waves. From Aziraphale's smile, maybe he can.

The caves are closed when they get there in the late afternoon, but Crowley's never been one for opening times. They hop over the mental barriers, and walk past the rather gimmicky set up of fake flames and a sound system designed to pump 'spooky' sound effects around the cave system. The tunnel walls of chalky rock follow fire safety regulations closer than he remembers, the way illuminated by neon green emergency exit sign. There's a few things he had forgotten about this place. Mostly that the tunnels lack the atmospheric candle sconces that used to bracket the walls, which doesn't bother Crowley but which must be uncomfortably dark in places for Aziraphale. The second is that these underground tunnels, warren-like and with an intentionally unpredictable geography, are thinner than he'd thought. The sides enough for two people to walk abreast but not much more, the ceilings excavated low and almost head height.

He regrets this immediately.

Aziraphale's moved in snugger against him, has taken his arm.

“You ok?” Crowley murmurs. The sound reverberates with an ugly distortion around the tunnel.

“I'm fine,” Aziraphale says, and maybe he means it, because he nudges Crowley with an elbow, and continues. “Go on then. I know you're practically dying to tell me about all your sordid little escapades.”

Crowley obliges, keeping half a mind on Aziraphale, making sure this isn't going to trigger anything unpleasant in him. He name-drops the names of the great and good (relatively) of the earlier centuries without shame, allows himself to twist and exaggerate some of the details of revelries and orgies – which he'd generally kept out of, using the opportunity to have his pick of the finest wines and offering encouragement when it was required like some kind of spectator sport.

They make their way to the Inner Temple, and the tunnels darken, the lights deliberately more spaced out, the shadows stretching. When they eventually get to the end of the tunnel system, the room done up in an equally gaudy fashion to the entrance, pocked with unconvincing waxworks of eighteenth century aristocrats getting pissed, there's only one light.

Crowley looks at Aziraphale, who has set his jaw, has fixed his gaze on the light.

“Would you mind awfully if...” Aziraphale coughs and inhales deeply. “Would you mind turning the light down for a moment, my dear?”

He doesn't sound sure about it, and Crowley tells him as such.

“You're not... well, the darkness doesn't exactly suit you these days, Aziraphale,” he says tentatively, wondering if Aziraphale would get defensive at telling him he's scared of it in not as many words.

Aziraphale doesn't.

“I have to... I can't be frightened forever,” he says insistently, more to himself than Crowley. “I'm.. I'm not there any more. I just need to... Would you, Crowley, please?”

Crowley sighs, and he's not happy about it.

“If I think for a minute, it's going badly...” he warns sternly, but Aziraphale's hand tightens reassuringly in his own.

“I trust you,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley turns the light off and Aziraphale breathes in a shocked breath.

Crowley's night vision kicks in. The darkness cocoons both of them, but Crowley can still see the outline of the absurd mannequins, the structure of the flint walls, the fake structures made to look like church architecture. Aziraphale's hand is clamped in his, and his breathing isn't relaxed, but he isn't panicking.

“How're you doing?” Crowley asks.

Aziraphale bobs his head, but clearly doesn't trust himself to speak for a moment.

“It was like this,” he breathes out finally. His words carry in the cavern, take on unsettling echoes. “Unrelentingly dark. At the beginning, I would make so much sound, and it would just echo back on me. And the mind is such a funny little thing. In the absence of signals, it makes them up. Sometimes I'd hear you whistling, as though you were just outside the door.”

Crowley doesn't want to know. It hurts to imagine, it crushes something inside him, and he wants to fling the lights back on, illuminate this whole cave system so Aziraphale never has to fear the dark again. But Aziraphale isn't frightened of the dark. It's not a very human fear of what he can't see, of the shadows that scuttle wrong out of the corner of your eye. What Aziraphale is scared of has already happened to him.

“I'd see things,” Aziraphale admits, and his voice has gotten smaller, tremulous. “People. Figures. You.”

“What did I say?” Crowley asks, but Aziraphale shakes his head fiercely, and Crowley gets the sense that that was the wrong question.

“It doesn't matter,” he says. “He wasn't real. Nothing he said was real. But you're _here_.” He clenches Crowley's hand even tighter. “You're _here_ , and it's dark, and I'm not there any more.”

“No,” Crowley says, returning the grip. “No, you're not.”

Aziraphale gives Crowley a wobbly smile when he turns the lights back up.

“Thank you for that, dearest,” he says.

And it's been a day for raw emotional outbursts apparently, and they both feel exhausted. Crowley suggests they go back to the car and find a hotel for the night. Aziraphale agrees, and they walk back, the light's brighter all the way along their route, and Crowley wonders whether Aziraphale is doing that or it's just the sense of heaviness in the air that's lifted.

Aziraphale is tiring, having been awake since they arrived in London, a recent record for him, but he stubbornly refuses to admit it even Crowley asks. Crowley subtly puts on classical music on the radio, and suggests Aziraphale fold up his scarf and rest his head against it so he doesn't get neck ache, and then Aziraphale's out like a light. Crowley smiles, pleased at the success of his cunning scheme, and conjures a thick tartan blanket to cover the angel's legs as they drive.

He turns the radio to a different channel, and keeps driving. They're nearing Reading and the traffic has thinned out since rush hour, leaving the roads scabbed with minor roadworks and limited cars, and they could stop here and find a hotel for the night. Equally, Crowley could keep driving, but even though he doesn't quite feel up to indulging in sleep these days, he's a creature of comforts, and would quite fancy a stop. He'd seen a sign for Bath a little while back, and is approaching the turn off.

He'd visited Bath once, many years ago. He'd run into Aziraphale in a caldarium, the angel looking uncomfortably sticky and sweaty from the spa, and clearly trying to distance himself from a dreadful bore of a conversational partner, some visiting Roman senator or another. He recalls rescuing the angel from that particular social quandary by implying to the senator some politically damaging details about some of his trysts with slaves, and when the man had bolted, he and Aziraphale had spent a delightful afternoon catching up and later he'd dragged his counterpart to a little out of the way tavern - “Come on, angel, you can get some of your monthly quota in while we drink, there's all sorts of gambling and sordid little goings on, you can try and tempt them all over to the moral life, it'll be a challenge.”

Crowley remembers the visit with fondness. Aziraphale hadn't done any thwarting, but then he hadn't done any tempting, and instead they'd polished off a rather spectacular bottle of Caecuban wine.

Crowley takes the road for Bath.

Two hours later, he gets there, and has managed to find a hotel of suitable calibre that he's sure he can persuade to give them a room.

As the Bentley slows to park, Aziraphale blinks awake, jolting only slightly when he sees his rumpled reflection in the darkened glass of the passenger window. It's only a slight divergence from his usual look; it's Crowley's strong suspicion that Aziraphale was created looking slightly windswept.

“We're in Bath,” Crowley says.

“I... we were here once, weren't we?” Aziraphale asks. “Years ago.”

“That's the one.”

“When you got that bottle of Caecuban red,” Aziraphale says, sounding a little bit more awake. “And I had to write a report as to why an entire tavern of freedmen had a spontaneous vision of the goddess Hestia when they looked at me.”

“You've got to admit, it was hilarious.”

“Not to Gabriel. He was furious. I couldn't exactly tell him it had been you, could I? I was meant to be thwarting you.”

“And an excellent job you were doing.” Crowley chuckles at Aziraphale's expression, which he's trying to school into unimpressed, but secretly tickled by the memory. “You want to stop here? Or do you want to keep driving?”

“You've been driving all day, dear, you must be tired,” Aziraphale puts a hand on his arm. “Let's rest up for the night.”

There's luckily a room free, so Crowley doesn't even have to convince the staff that he's a paying guest already. It's when he opens the door, and sees the two single beds, carefully made and with square chocolates on the pillows, that he stops. And it shouldn't surprise him, why should it, the receptionist hadn't made assumptions when she saw the two of them booking in, Crowley had thoughtlessly said yes when she told him about the room, but he's wrong-footed somehow, disappointed in a way he can't articulate.

Aziraphale seems dismayed too, a crestfallen expression as he sees the sleeping situation that he quickly banishes, but that might be wish-full thinking on Crowley's part.

Aziraphale's nap hasn't shaken his tiredness, and he makes his apologies to Crowley as he divests his shirt and waistcoat with a wave into the most dated flannel pyjamas. Crowley tells him not to be daft, to get some sleep, that he'll amuse himself with the late night channels, but as he sits on top of the covers, his back leaning against the starchy pillow, his attention is scatty and disquieted and he channel flicks in a huff, growing increasingly irate.

He looks over at Aziraphale, breathing lightly over on his right. He's curled up right up against the edge, his back to Crowley, but even though the bed is sizeable for one, he's left enough space for another person. Maybe he's not ready to say things out loud. Maybe the day has been full of too much vulnerability without adding this one to the pile. But it's intentional in the unsubtle way only Aziraphale can manage. An undemanding offering that Crowley can take or ignore as he chooses.

It's been a long day. His nerves feel scraped, and there is something here that neither of them has bolstered the courage to confront. But the night is quiet and Aziraphale wants him and Crowley has always been the most selfish person he knows. He sighs, and flicks the TV off. His resolve crumbles like a shoddy sandcastle.

He shucks off his tasteful smart-casual attire into some rather fetching pyjamas of his own, clambering over to the other bed and settling under the covers before he can change his mind.  
  
Aziraphale snuffles in his sleep and shuffles back against Crowley, a comfortable weight against his ribcage, but he doesn't wake. Delicately, Crowley places his arm around Aziraphale's waist, and laces their fingers together. He rests his head against Aziraphale's neck, and they'll have to talk about this sometime. But not now. Not tonight.

He still doesn't sleep, spending the night lulled into calm by Aziraphale's breathing, but he finds he doesn't mind that so much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone unfamiliar with UK geography, Crowley and Aziraphale visit Ashridge Estate and the Hellfire Caves, both of which are in the Chiltern Hills.


	3. The Cotswolds and the Midlands

They forge a routine, as much as the lackadaisical diversions and aimless accession to gentle, mildly prodding whims can be described in that way. They're on holiday after all, if one could look at their permanent desertion of their respective posts as such, and the days and weeks take on the timeless, slightly dreamlike quality of all good holidays, meandering like a particularly indolent river.

Aziraphale wakes up late, eyeing the bedside clock stupidly and unseeingly for a moment before he bounds up, fretting that they've lost half the day, that there might not be time to see everything, and gesturing his shirt on inside out, his socks mismatched. Crowley, already up and sitting fully clothed on top of the covers, will laughingly remind him that they've all the time they want, and will only sometimes inform Aziraphale that his clothes are on wrong. They'll sit down in the hotel area set aside for breakfast, Crowley sipping coffee and sometimes treating himself to a slice of toast lathered in butter because he likes watching the conveyor toasting machine, Aziraphale pouring over maps and flyers and his growing collection of little guidebooks, making intrigued noises, absent-mindedly eating his way through a bushel of croissants and umpteen cups of tea. Aziraphale approaches their time like the newly retired, or a pensioner who has just got their bus pass, and Crowley sits back and finds he doesn't mind that very much at all.

They spend two days in Bath; they walk in parks and wander the old Roman thermae they once met up in, light-heartedly bickering about the trouble Crowley allegedly got Aziraphale in (expanding to a general excavation of the number of times Crowley was apparently behind Aziraphale's woes). Aziraphale gleeful recounts memories long fallen into disrepair and shoved to the back of the mental closet, sometimes giggling so hard it sounds like he's hiccuping excessively, and Crowley tries to defend himself in between laughing so hard he's got to wipe away tears. The debate ends up like most of their other long-standing arguments, a permanent draw.

On the second day, they take afternoon tea in an upmarket Regency tearoom, and Aziraphale sneaks the half-slice of cake that Crowley hasn't finished without thinking. Crowley is drawn to the thermal baths, because a building dedicated entirely to such pampering and sloth and vanity is something he's meant to champion, but also because it's been a while, and he loves the thick cloying heat of the sauna rooms, the hot rocks pressing down his spine, the exfoliating rubs and creams and masks that make him feel like he's shed a layer of skin. It's the sort of thing that Aziraphale would usually like, but the angel doesn't look keen when he mentions it.

He makes to cross this off the list then, because Crowley doesn't want to go in on his own and risk losing sight of his travelling companion, but Aziraphale must read his expression like a large-print headline because he touches his arm, and tells him to go on, don't let me stop you dear boy, have your fun, I'll sit in the waiting room and read the paper.

Crowley spends three hours getting massaged, steamed, buffed and polished, almost dozing off in the humid warmth of the sauna. And there's a tingle of nerves, but they're easier to ignore, because he knows that Aziraphale's right in the waiting room, probably with his tongue half-stuck out, a furrow being ground between his eyebrows as he tackles the crossword. When he comes back out, that's exactly what he finds.

As the days trickle on, they stroll up the Cotswolds, stopping as they please and following their own particular whims. Crowley spends a day wandering through one of the largest arboretums this end of the country, marvelling at the diversity of specimens, Aziraphale's arm tucked into his own as they walk and Crowley chattering about botanical matters and little titbits of knowledge he's picked up over the years. At some points, he can't help himself, and after advising the security cameras to be looking elsewhere, he carefully harvests a cutting from a few more spectacular growths.

“An investment for our garden, angel!” he justifies himself when Aziraphale scolds him lightly.

“Your garden you mean, you old serpent,” Aziraphale replies fondly.

The weather is glorious for the time of year, but it's still England, so there are the odd overcast days and even a few spring downpours as they meander out of the Cotswolds, a plethora of country houses and grand gardens and sunny tea shops under their belts. When one of these turns in the weather disrupts a plan for a river-side stroll, Crowley sees his opportunity and takes Aziraphale to the cinema for the first time since they went to go and see _The Exorcist_ together. Aziraphale eats most of Crowley's popcorn even though he'd declared at the food kiosk that he wasn't much of a fan, and Crowley throws some of the unpopped kernels at him when a slightly predictable action scene happens. Aziraphale roundly pronounces him childish and immature, but that doesn't stop him throwing some back until they're trying to shush each other to quell the noises they're making. Aziraphale's quite taken by the advances in 'computerised technology' since he last saw a film, even though he's fairly dismissive of the story, and they heatedly disagree as to whether the ending was a perfect culmination of the character's struggles and the overarching narrative metaphor (Crowley) or a load of old tosh (Aziraphale).

In the evenings, they dine, or stay in the hotel room and order room service. Aziraphale will have bought a book from a charity shop at some point, and he'll sit reading it on the bed while Crowley half-sprawls across him, watching TV or a film. Sometimes the hotel has two beds, but that's stopped mattering so much. With wordless motions, they've started gravitating to only one.

One night in Cirencester, Crowley glances up from where he's struggling with a particularly fiendish sudoku puzzle, having chosen to stay on his bed for a change so he doesn't accidentally elbow Aziraphale in the face with an overeagerness to write a long sought number combination, and notices that Aziraphale hasn't gone to sleep. Aziraphale usually drops off with all the grace and suddenness of falling over, but he's tossing and turning with little petulant huffs, taking it rather unfairly out on his pillow. He is also casting glances over at Crowley to see whether he's going to join him. He is, to his credit, trying to disguise this, but it's got all the subtly of a brick through a window.

“Anything for a quiet life,” Crowley chides, and gets up to slide in beside him. “Move over, angel.”

Aziraphale squeaks as Crowley's feet touch his legs.

“My dear, you're freezing!” he protests, squirming away.

“Cold-blooded,” Crowley reminds him with a toothy gin, trying to worm his limbs closer to Aziraphale's, and getting kicked away for his troubles.

Aziraphale eventually relents with only a little bit more complaining. Crowley moves nearer to bracket his body against him.

“Is this... is this OK?” he asks, uncharacteristically quiet.

Aziraphale's hand comes up to anchor his fingers around Crowley's wrist. He has his back to Crowley, so he can't see his expression.

“It's OK,” he replies, and he doesn't let go even when he slips into sleep. And then, just like that, they stop the pretence of sleeping separately. Crowley greedily tries to prompt their bedtimes earlier, just to he can take advantage of the warmth, and Aziraphale knows exactly what his game is, but indulges him nonetheless. And somewhere near Cheltenham, Crowley opens his eyes one morning to find he's finally slept, and he lies drowsy and contented under the weight of the eiderdown duvet, Aziraphale heating the bed like an open oven as he snores and shifts in a dreamless sleep.

Sometimes in the mornings, when Aziraphale thinks Crowley's not awake, he'll press a dry kiss to his forehead, and Crowley struggles to remember the last time he was this deliriously happy.

One night, they drive up to one of the highest summits in the area, park up the car and look out across the rolling hills as the sky pinkens and the sun sinks lower. Aziraphale brings a tartan blanket to sit on, a thermos flask full of tea and a bottle of rather saucy red, and they sit quietly on the roof of the Bentley, watching the horizon go dark.

“I'm going to retire,” Crowley says apropos of nothing as Aziraphale passes him a little plastic picnic cup full of wine. “I haven't been really working for them since Tadfield, I might as well make it official.”

Aziraphale looks at him, but it's hard to read his expression in the growing dark.

“A demon without Hell,” he says thoughtfully to himself.

“An angel without Heaven,” Crowley reminds him.

“It's definitely a first for the books,” Aziraphale says. “It's not like there's precedence for it. Who knows what will happen.” He chews his lip nervously.

“Do you really believe what you said?” he asks after sipping his wine. “That they'll want their war after all? That it will be us versus them?”

“It won't be much of a change from how it's always been,” Crowley replies, and Aziraphale smiles at that, and it grows like a watered tree, blossoming to an shy beam.

He holds his glass up and they toast wordlessly.

Crowley wakes up with the tendrils of a hangover, frowning and confused, experiencing a whole body crick from where he's contorted his limbs in sleep. Someone's placed a scarf under his neck, tucked a thick oatmeal coat around him. There's the rumbling of a perfectly preserved 1926 Bentley engine beneath him, aggravating the stiffness in his limbs, and over it, comes a humming to an incredibly dated baroque melody.

“Are y' driving my car?” Crowley asks with a sluggish incredulity. His tongue feels like a cotton ball in his mouth but he gets the words out.

“Doesn't bother you too much I trust?” comes the jaunty reply.

Crowley doesn't know how he feels, because no one has ever driven his car but him before, but he settles for making an evasive grunt and wincing at the streak of headache that flits across his forehead.

“Go back to sleep,” Aziraphale says, obscenely chirpy for the amount of wine he drank. “I'm driving us to Gloucester.”

Crowley nods without really listening, and is starting to doze again before the words filter through.

“Can you even drive?” he asks.

“I can do a great many things you aren't aware of,” Aziraphale replies haughtily, and accidentally clicks on the windscreen wiper instead of the left-hand indicator.

Crowley decides that this worry is a problem for another time. He shuts his eyes again.

“Don't touch the radio presets,” he mumbles.

“I wouldn't dream of it.”

“An' the indicator only needs a gentle push, the car gets antsy if...”

“ _My dear._ You're in safe hands, I assure you. Sleep.”

Crowley does as he's told, smiling.

 

* * *

 

There are bad days, of course.

One morning, Crowley wakes up from a disjointed sleep, the sense of something murky and overgrown dissipating slowly as he wakes. Aziraphale is awake already beside him. His shoulder draped in the yellowing haze of the morning, a faint run of freckles visible through the gap in his flannel shirt. Crowley doesn't know if he slept or not.

“Morning,” he says cautiously.

Aziraphale's unblinking eyes are staring at a point past his head. Crowley is sure he can see him, but in the same way as safety cards on aeroplanes or exit signs in a cinema, he's background. They've got that dulled, unfocused sheen to them, fogged up by a film of something vacant. People lose focus all the time. When they're daydreaming, or not listening, or their minds are miles away in sunnier climbs. That is not this expression. This expression is trying very hard to not be anywhere at all.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley asks, subdued, and his reply is a dense silence.

He's learned over the course of these lapses that it's not that Aziraphale can't hear him. Aziraphale isn't in the hotel room, not right now, but he can see Crowley, can see the flock wallpaper of their Travel Lodge, can see the open wardrobe where their coats hang side by side. He just can't trust it.

They won't be going anywhere today.

Slowly, Crowley reaches forward, and places his fingers over Aziraphale's hand, precise and pressure-less, like he's setting his fingers down on the strings of some violin ready to play. Ever so carefully, he pulls the hand towards him, across the small gulf that separates their bodies, places the half-fist that Aziraphale's made against his chest, and waits.

Aziraphale always comes back. It's only takes time.

His hand unfurls like spreading wings, palm flat over Crowley's chest. His flat expression ripples with concentration, with an uneasy frown. And after a while, Aziraphale's eyes refocus, like a blurry background suddenly seen through glasses, and there is such relief on his face.

“You back?” Crowley asks.

“Yes,” Aziraphale replies, his voice thick like he's been crying.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Aziraphale opens his mouth, closes it again, and shakes his head. There are things behind his gaze that only time can shift.

Crowley gets it.

“Alright,” he says casually, stretching out, as though he's just thought of the idea himself. “We can stay here for the day. Breakfast in bed, naff daytime TV, the whole shebang. Spoil ourselves a little bit.”

Aziraphale bobs his head once like a tired marionette and turns over onto his side, his back to Crowley. It's not a rejection. They're having to get good at things like this, reading into gesture and motion, what they say and what they don't. Crowley doesn't know why, and he won't ask, but in his black moods, Aziraphale finds it hard to look at him for too long.

Crowley slots himself up against the curve of Aziraphale's back. Aziraphale's the taller, and Crowley's forehead rests against the nook of his neck and shoulder. He feels, for a split second, unconscionably guilty, because he loves moments like these. Holding Aziraphale like this as they lie against each other at night, tenderness written in the arch of their bodies, their spaces blurred into each other, limbs tangled and draped heavily over the other. Too often when they're awake, when they don't have the low light of evening, Aziraphale's pulling away, diving into the day when Crowley wants to just ask him to stay a while, let them lie there, let Crowley bask in his warmth, in the intimate dip their bodies have made. And now, in these moments, he gets what he wants, what he's too tentative to ask for, but Aziraphale's body is taut, warring with thoughts he won't share, struggling through a mire of emotions he can't name.

“Sorry, my dear,” Aziraphale murmurs unhappily.

Crowley headbutts him gently with his forehead.

“Shut up, angel,” he says teasingly. “We're having a moment here.”

Aziraphale huffs something that on paper that could be a laugh, and Crowley feels pleased. It's short-lived, and the guilt comes back like the tide.

“If you want... the tickets are still valid.”

They'd booked matinee tickets for something at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Crowley had been studying the programme, making little comments about how these actors compared to the great of earlier decades, and they'd both been looking forward to it.

“We can go tomorrow,” Crowley says. “I don't mind.”

“But...”

“You'd do the same for me, angel,” Crowley replies. “We'll stay here until you're feeling better.”

It is true, because Aziraphale does. Because the angel is not the only one carrying his ghosts around with them, the contents of his poorly dealt-with troubles upended without warning. There are days when Crowley buzzes sleepless with something scratching under his skin, some crackling impotence that renders him frustrated and angry and reminds him too much of failure. He struggles to get the fog to clear, and he's short in his speech and angry in his manner, mired in a guilt that won't shift. He'll leave Aziraphale, incensed by his moods, and he'll go and find some out of the way place, and he'll drink until the feeling is drowned out, when all he feels is flat and empty and lost. And he can't understand why, because Aziraphale's back, he got him back, they're together, he should be happy, but he's not, not today, because time doesn't heal things just like that it seems. Aziraphale will find him later, and Crowley isn't ever quite sure how he always manages it, but he'll arrive and settle a hand against his back, and then with infinite patience, take him home. He listens to his furious aborted ramblings, the anger he's bleeding out through the skin like sweat, the sobriety he doesn't want to embrace just yet. He doesn't complain, or judge, or ask why, just tucks him in and strokes his hair until he falls asleep in a stupor. Crowley suspects they both have their own ways of coping.

“Could you...” Aziraphale starts, and he can feel him tensing again, and Crowley presses his lips to the skin at the back of his neck as a reassurance. “Could you... talk?”

Aziraphale always asks him. To tell him everywhere he went in those years they spent apart, all the places he looked, all the things he saw. He doesn't know how much it helps, but Aziraphale asks as he waits for the mood to pass, and so Crowley obliges.

“Sure,” Crowley always replies, and so he does.

 

* * *

 

They approach the Midlands in the same way Crowley approaches jigsaw puzzles. Aziraphale has a structured pattern – corners first, then outside bits, then working inwards. Crowley's strategy is to turn out the contents of the box, set all the pieces upright and stare at them, allowing patterns to lazily unify in his mind's eye, attempting multiple times to match one piece to another without success, but undeterred by his setbacks. So, because Crowley is driving, this is the methodology they take in travel. They go left to right without much pattern like an indecisive yo-yo – they traverse up to the Warwickshire area, sample Warwick and Kenilworth and Leamington, but instead of travelling on to Birmingham, they manage to reach Manchester after about a week because Crowley decided they should stop off at Cambridge, Great Yarmouth and Shropshire first. These were on the way by the same logic that Edinburgh is sort of on the way to Cardiff, or that a pit-stop in Oslo is sort of on the way to Boston. Like someone who has fully committed to throwing their lot in with a crazed map-maker, or a man who has left barren their field of cares, Aziraphale has stopped worrying too much and lets Crowley take them wherever they ended up.

They've arrived in York to a traditional northern greeting of light hail and a wind psyching itself up for a committed bluster. They get there late, distracted by something or another on the way, and Crowley's eyes start to get heavy mid-way through the documentary he's watching, making exaggerated yawning noises, and he succumbs to the inevitable at about eleven, settling down next to a sat up and reading Aziraphale and burbling a goodnight to him.

Come three am, and something unusual is happening. For the first time in weeks for a start, Aziraphale is the one not sleeping. There is nothing stopping him – he put down his book hours ago – although his arm has gone numb because there's a demon fast asleep on it, hissing softly, adding a thread of sound to the creak of the walls and the whistle of the wind and the tapping fingers of the rain on the window. Aziraphale's mind keeps coming back to think on this, Crowley in his arms, in the same way a child on Christmas might repeatedly creep out of bed to check under the tree. He keeps getting distracted by it, not the kind of bright lights and loud noises distraction, the attention grabbing of circuses and arcades and cinema shows. It's a distraction like being suddenly caught in an arc of sunlight pouring through clouds, catching a scent of something sweet and unexpected recalled from childhood, seeing someone beloved smiling and feeling that sensation echo in your chest. Aziraphale strokes the hair on Crowley's head and breathes quietly so as not to disturb him.

No, what Aziraphale is doing is thinking. He finds it harder to do in daylight, when Crowley tugs on his coat, brimming with the things they can do and experience, and Aziraphale following in the wake of his own personal whirlwind. Taking the advantage, now, in the back rooms of his brain, some diligent and studious desire has chosen to clock in the overtime, rousing the bellows and flicking on the lights and hankering down over a mental table to do some serious pondering. He's been at it for a good many hours, drawn away only by the distraction of Crowley, and his train of thought is, if anything, speeding up.

He had tried not to think too much, down there in the dark. This was not to say that he hadn't, but with the lack of new stimulus, additional data, memories growing slightly fainter in the retelling, his thoughts had fossilised into the same depressing conclusions.

With Crowley breathing against his neck, the flames he'd extinguished for his own sanity he was allowing to rekindle. A locked-box of hopes and fears and regrets that he's now having to sort and sift through.

He is thinking about Heaven. About Hell. He is thinking about himself, and he is thinking, most of all, about Crowley.

After a few more goes on the cognitive merry-go-round, he gets up. Careful not to wake the demon as he slips his deadened arm out from under him. Crowley manages to almost immediately roll into the warm indent in the bed he's left behind.

Aziraphale pads into the small hotel bathroom, and closes the door so the illumination doesn't rouse Crowley. He doesn't lock it, because no matter what he rationally knows, the size of the space still has the unexpected capacity to bring a fanged, growling terror to the forefront of his mind.

He stands in front of the mirror, its foreground interrupted by a plastic cup occupied by the branches of two toothbrushes, a rather swanky comb Crowley bought in some men's grooming shop, a little pot of lavender hand-cream that Aziraphale was tempted by. Aziraphale for the moment ignores these giddy reminders of domesticity, and instead gives himself a long hard look.

He didn't use to think a lot about his body. There was a lot of things he didn't use to think about, wilfully or not, and his corporation is another one to add to that particular list. It was something he had, of course, that he took care of, that he was aware of on some level but in the same way that people are aware of wine bottles and yoghurt pots and envelopes. Aziraphale's corporation housed his essence, and so long as it fulfilled that function, he didn't pay it much mind.

Angels wear their bodies like a work uniform. Aziraphale was expected to keep his well-groomed, healthy, and present himself in such a manner as befitting his station and adhering to company guidelines. How successful he was on this front was a matter of some regular consternation from his superiors; Aziraphale's presentation had always veered towards the type of employee who, at a company meeting, turns up five minutes late muttering apologetically about the traffic and gasping, a coffee stain on his shirt, his tie knotted too tight and his hair still damp from the shower. It wasn't that Aziraphale didn't try. His hair tended towards a bramble brush getting a perm look if it wasn't kept in check, and according to some mysterious rule, his clothes – no matter how modern and sleek – would almost immediately slide into well-lived in, faintly worn and slightly dusty upon first wearing them. Eventually Aziraphale had stopped trying so hard, and meekly weathered the lecture he'd get whenever he had to go back to Heaven. He did what he was told as well as he was able, kept his hair short and tried to ignore his suspicions that, when it came down to it, he just wasn't particularly good at being an angel.

And now this body, well, it's _his._ In the same way that human bodies are theirs, that they can adjust and decorate with colours and inks and dyes and modifying surgery, the only one they're given and the one they have to make do with the best they can. He doesn't know how to think about that, the finality of this form. They're not exactly going to hand out a new corporation to a former agent who has renounced his position. Now, if he gets discorporated, there won't be anywhere to go but back, and something in the recesses of his mind quails at the idea of returning.

He studies, for the first time, the changes those years wrought on his body. It's not as bad as he had assumed. His body is hard-wearing, human only in the ways it has to be. There's a sparse scatter of blonde hairs that curl over his chest; no nipples to speak of unless he makes the effort. Going further down, the convex planes of his stomach, chased down by a starburst of freckles congregating over his hips. He's thinner than he was, and he can't help but think bitterly that Heaven would be proud. His body has lost the roundness his former comforts afforded him, and retaking the ground is a slow process. He can see his hip-bones, the promise of collarbones, and he finds himself irrationally angry at that. Finds himself missing the rolls of weight and the softness of skin he used to wear, the space he used to take up, that was _him,_ that was a choice he made regarding his body, how he wanted to look, his small rebellion against the party line. He can regain it of course, but it's that it was taken from him in the first place.

It's as tears start to roll wobbly down his face that he recognises that it's not about his body, not really.

He'd had no choices, not for all those years. He'd lain immobile, trapped in a sunless cage, wasting away, tormented by his failures to act, his regrets, disturbed only by the shadows of people who weren't real. He had given up. It was a fluke that he got out, a weird unpredicted glitch in the universe, and he could very easily still be back there. And even, he thinks, his mind clutching to this as his train of thought gains momentum, even in the years before, what choices had he had then? Everything he wanted, he dissected with his own fears, his own prejudices, a mastery of self-sabotage. He was told what he should be, how he should look, what he should want - he was created being told that there were Truths – and he'd _listened_.

Aziraphale looks at his white-blond hair that never lies neatly, ruffled into up-struck waves. He fiddles with a curl, rolling it between his fingers. His hair doesn't grow unless he wants it to, and so it's been like this since Eden, barring minor additions.

Maybe he wants a change.

No, he thinks slowly. He considers his former conclusions like someone examining a pressed flower. No, that wasn't quite right was it? He had had choices. He'd always had choices. He just hadn't made them.

He looks at his body, the crows feet that bunch around his eyes, the marks on his lip from where he's been biting them almost without noticing. He sees something that looks quite human.

He'd had about as much choice in being an angel as Crowley had had in becoming a demon. But then Crowley had been an angel too, once. Genetics, Crowley had once emphatically argued, had very little to do with anything, and Aziraphale had been inclined to agree. Being an angel was part of his identity, but it had, more relevantly, been a _job_. And aside from the geographical positioning on the vertical axis, the different corporate propaganda, the interior decorating and the wing grooming, being an angel was not so different from being a demon. Crowley had encouraged divine inspiration as much as Aziraphale had, from time to time, nudged some humans to dabble in a bit of healthy lust with a consenting partner.

But humanity, well. That was a whole different existential kettle. Because being human, really, was a choice. More of a choice than being an angel or a demon. You could genetically be a person, with all the right chromosomes in the correct places and all the important parts fully functioning and still not achieve it. People weren't naturally good, or naturally bad, and left unchecked and unbothered, they inclined towards natural instincts, which were generally to act like people. And people chose not to be human all the time.

Heaven had told Aziraphale that they knew best, that there had been a Plan and it was his duty to stick to it, that he shouldn't question ineffability, but they hadn't known anything. They'd told him that there was a reason for everything, but meaningless things happened all the time. There were meaningless wars, and meaningless deaths, meaningless romances and meaningless lives. A life could be wasted. Chances could be given and squandered, and there was no meaning in that, no one came out on top, no one prospered from lost opportunity.

They'd told him that demons couldn't love, were incapable of it, that it wasn't their fault but that was how it was I'm afraid nothing to be done, and yet there had been a demon using him as a pillow last night, a demon who kept the bedside light on so Aziraphale wouldn't panic in the dark, a demon who had looked for him, who had kept on looking even if it had been hopeless. A demon who Loved him in all the ways that mattered.

It's not like he didn't know. He's known for a long time. But acknowledging it now fills him with a dragging shame.

Because Aziraphale hadn't been as strong as that. Crowley had looked and looked and looked, and Aziraphale had tried everything he could before he'd given up. He knows exactly what he'd thought during those years. Knows without a doubt that if he'd had the ability to end it, properly end it, to make it all just stop, he would have taken the option unquestioningly. He might have thought about Crowley with despair, he would have thought about what ending it all would do to the demon if he ever found him, he would have regretted it but it wouldn't have made him change his mind. And now Aziraphale has to carry on knowing that, when it comes to it, in the dark, when frightened and alone and faced with two clear choices, he'd done what he's always done, and put himself first. And surely Crowley deserves someone who would make him happy, who had been stronger, who had never wavered in his affections, who hadn't been so frightened of the repercussions that he'd treated his love for Crowley like some sort of moral failing, like it was something he could _fix._

He keeps being reminded of the Crowley he had seen, down in the unbroken dark of his prison. Sometimes his mind conjured a scowling Gabriel from the shadows, snooty and contemptuous, but mostly it was Crowley that his brain would read through misfiring signals, rewriting the darkness into something tangible. Crowley who hadn't been real, who had made it difficult to remember that when he pressed his hand against the glass nearest Aziraphale, murmuring kindnesses and promises he couldn't possibly keep.

Crowley who would eventually, like a good dream tipping predictably into a nightmare, devolve into bitterness, face scrunched with a snarl, anger scrawled open across his face. Crowley who hated him for the things he'd done and hadn't done, for stringing him along, for hurting him, who told him nothing Aziraphale didn't know to be true.

Because he must have hurt him. And saying that, well, he hadn't meant it, that _deep down_ Aziraphale had loved him, that wasn't any consolation. Because the best excuses in the world are still excuses, and Aziraphale had had a lifetime of becoming very good at making them.

His hands on the cool marble of the sink counter are trembling. He can't bear looking at his face. He chokes back little hitching tears because he doesn't want Crowley to wake up, to see him like this, to try and comfort him after everything Aziraphale's _done._

It occurs to him, with a growing intensity like air heating up to boiling, that something inside him, bright and untarnished and unyielding, something at the heart of him is getting cross. An arms-folded, finger-wagging, quietly-seething _furious._

How dare you, the thing at the heart of him tells him. How _dare_ you persist in this self-pity, how dare you sabotage your chance to be finally, perfectly happy. How dare you look at what's being offered to you, what has always been offered to you, and shrink away because you're scared you won't measure up, that you won't be good enough. Be good enough. Make yourself worthy of what you're being given. You stood next to him, ready to fight the Morningstar, and you _knew_ what side you were on, you knew who you'd chosen. And now you're scared, you're pulling away, you're holding back because of all your doubts, that one day he'll look at you and know how much of a coward you are. So do better. Be better.

Aziraphale thinks of how he loves Crowley, of how Crowley loves him. Thinks of how things might be, allows himself to believe that he can have this. That he can _choose_ this.

The flame inside him burns brighter and bigger than he is, and he _wants_ in the same way as some people cry or laugh, with his whole body, his entire essence leant into the sensation. He's torn between bursting into tears, and slamming the door of the hotel bathroom open, grabbing Crowley and pressing kisses to his cheeks, his forehead, his lips, telling him he loves him with an outpouring of everything he's made of.

Aziraphale breathes out, and allows the kicked-up dust of his newly refurbished world to settle. He's never been a door-banging, bombastic declarations sort of person. Instead, he clicks out the bathroom light and steals back to bed. He slides under the covers, and for the first time, thinks nothing at all of gathering Crowley against him, pressing a kiss to his dark rumpled hair.

An excited plan coalesces in his mind. And when morning arrives and finds Crowley continuing to breathe open-mouthed against the pillow, Aziraphale dresses with a thought, writes a reassuring note to Crowley on the hotel notepad, and steps out into the morning.


	4. York

It doesn't take long for Crowley to discover Aziraphale's gone out. He wakes up with a begrudging slowness, stretching out and burrowing his face into the pillow, turning over to chase after the heated imprint left on the other side, only to feel something crinkle as it gets squashed under Crowley's head. It transpires that Aziraphale, clearly not wanting to cause Crowley undue worry and not taking the chance that Crowley might miss the note on the pillow, has also left short messages propped against the in-room kettle, placed dead-centre of the plywood desk opposite the bed, and – when Crowley shuffles into the bathroom – inside the toothbrush holder. 

_Just popped out for a spell,_ each of these small reassurances read. _I'll be back before midday. Xx_

There's no name, but it's Aziraphale's without a doubt, the elaborate curlicues and swishes of his copperplate handwriting. 

Crowley does not worry. He's getting better at being separate from Aziraphale, at knowing that they can spend time apart without fearing what that entails. He keeps his room pacing to a minimum as he brushes his teeth, he ventures downstairs to the breakfast room and only chugs one cup of coffee to settle his misgivings, even makes small talk with the family on the opposite table. Going back to the room, he manages to focus on one and a half episodes of _Come Dine With Me_ without glancing at the clock with the anxious repetition of a metronome. 

The clock ticks on to half ten, quarter to eleven, eleven o'clock. He flicks idly through the flyers and advertising leaflets Aziraphale had gathered like flower cuttings from the front desk, and he plans the day ahead with consideration to the weather forecast. 

There's a prim, tap-tap knock, shadowed by a familiar 'hullo!' at about half eleven. Crowley feels relief with the same dizzying wave as if he stood up to fast. He sweeps his hair back, fixing any strands that have strayed loose, and he makes an effort to lean back in the cheap plastic-backed chair by the desk like a man of leisure distracted by his journals, untroubled and unbuffeted by paltry cares, a lofty rise to his head as he swings the chair round. 

“Hey you,” he says as a greeting. He sounds, he assesses with some degree of pride, rather suave. As though his mind has only just returned to Aziraphale's absence instead of having been doing doughnuts around the fact since he woke up. “Got your notes. I've been looking at these leaflets of yours. I was thinking, we could go and have a look at the Tower? It's this old ruined fortification, right up your alley, we can go and see how much of the 'historical information' is a load of old...”

He angles his head to glance at Aziraphale, and his suaveness dies suddenly and has a poorly attended funeral as he nearly topples out of his chair. Rallying bravely, he settles for gaping slightly. His words paddle furiously before sinking in his throat. He makes a strangled sound that's only distantly related to language in a second cousin, thrice removed sort of way, and is immediately embarrassed at what his reaction says about him. 

It's just that... well...

Aziraphale's changed his clothes. He hadn't brought his coat with him when he left the hotel that morning, the weather only dull and overcast without being too frosty, and for the past few weeks, he's been alternating between a manifested approximation of his old clothes – tatty, beloved waistcoat the colour of milky tea, droopy little bow tie – and what Crowley imagines Aziraphale's pyjamas would have looked like if he'd ever got around to owning any – that is to say, years out of date, terribly unfashionable and only lacking a daft little nightcap because Aziraphale hadn't thought of it and Crowley would have done them both a favour and burned it had he done so. The only genuine articles he owns, are his scuffed but carefully kept brogues, and the coat, scarf and hat Crowley bought in London, which Aziraphale finds any occasion to wear. 

It's not that Aziraphale doesn't care about clothes. He's acquainted with the concept of fashion, but unlike Crowley, who is on first name terms with it, he's considered it not really worth his time, and the two have generally kept to different circles and avoided crossing paths. Crowley tends to observe what other people are wearing, and then replicating what they're doing (and, if he said so himself, making vast improvements on it). He likes to look good, takes great pride in his appearance. Aziraphale, in contrast, buys clothes he likes and wears them to the ground, until all the darning in the world won't keep the seams together. They tend to be comfortable, mould around him and quickly become faded with wear; Crowley has always suspected that Aziraphale's essence rusts whatever he wears in the same way salt-water corrodes iron. 

But today, he's making an effort. 

It would have been the height of fashion if it wasn't about fifty years out of date, but it's all the more endearing for it. Aziraphale's set a laden bag down by the door, which clearly means he's raided one of those out of the way, artfully vintage shops off the side street. 

He's dressed up. The shirt, crisply ironed but fast degrading to rumpled simply by Aziraphale's proximity, is a muted grey and white affair, the fabric marked with neat square shapes that are half covered by a dark grey woollen waistcoat. Someone has clearly helped him with the navy tie that brings it together, for the knot is regular and not choked like he usually ends up making them, although it won't remain that way for long by the way Aziraphale keeps moving his hand up to fiddle with it so it sits right. Dark trousers hug his curves, and Aziraphale has clearly laid down the law with his shoes, declaring that on no uncertain terms should they be seen with a speck of mud – they've taken such advice to heart and are now practically mirrors, gleaming with the reflected light of the hotel room. The whole affair is topped off with a sensible tawny brown jacket, a pocket handkerchief peeking out of the upper pocket delicately. 

It looks... rather gallant, truth be told. It suits him. Crowley looks him over with a very bold appreciation, taking it all in with a brain-restarting thrill. 

But it's his _hair._

Aziraphale's hair has always been a) short, b) kept within regulations, soldier-like in its maintenance , and three or c or whatever) has presented itself with the graceful tussled look of a hedgerow worried by a storm or an expanding coral reef. It's grown out a little recently, beginning to curl under his ears, and Crowley has had to restrain himself to making veiled compliments about how well it suits him without hinting to strongly that Crowley likes it, really likes it, imagines it longer, tangling his fingers through it, the locks that would surely tend to curls knotted in his grip. It would be incorrect to say Crowley's been rather fixated on it, but... well, there's not many other suitable synonyms. 

Crowley's imagination didn't do it justice. Aziraphale's hair spills out from his head like a careless stream, winding down from his head like foliage with ringlets. It tumbles like a giddy brook, tucked hurriedly behind his ears in tight, scruffy white-blond curls, teasing the nape of his neck, corkscrewing out like it's never met a hairbrush it could get on with. It suits him exactly, softens the lines of his face to give him a romantic air. It's completely different but there's no period of adjustment, no shock as Crowley struggles to reconcile what he's seeing with what he knows. It's perfect. 

Crowley's mouth has gone the sort of desert-dry that usually only a thumping hangover can achieve. 

He has a lot of things he wants to say but someone's put up an 'out for lunch' sign where his brain should be. 

Not that Aziraphale's speaking either. He shifts his weight from one foot to another, holding back a strong urge to fiddle or adjust or play with some part of his ensemble. He hasn't broken eye contact with Crowley but something very British inside him very obviously wants to. 

“I...ahem,” Aziraphale says finally, apparently coming to the mortified decision that one of them has to say something and the universe has decreed that it's him. “I was wondering, my dear... If you'd... that is to say, if you'd like... if you'd permit me to take you out to dinner?”

It's not midday yet. Crowley's plan of action before teatime had previously included going to see an old Norman keep, ambling around a museum dedicated to roving Scandinavians and reminding Aziraphale how fetching he himself had looked when he sported a grand beard back in the day, moving on to loitering outside the largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe while Aziraphale predictably went inside to enthuse about the architecture and stained glass, and he had intended on using this as a bartering tool to get the angel to go to the railway museum with him with minimal fuss. 

His plans have now narrowed like the zoom of a camera. He swallows. 

Aziraphale is asking him out on a date. He's gotten all dressed up in nice clothes, grown out his hair, and yep – he's even snuck in time for a manicure. He's done this for _Crowley._ He's standing there, red as a fire engine, looking like a nervous courting teenager, like a sweaty-palmed youth before prom. 

Crowley's insides – the parts that haven't been co-opted as circuitry in the connection that's lit up the inside of him like fairy lights - have gone all gooey. 

“I'd love to,” he pushes out with a tight breathless sound like his lungs have forgotten that they've meant to have a two-way system going on. Aziraphale's cheeks are still the same colour as someone who has just valiantly chased down a commuter bus in order to avoid being late for work, but on hearing Crowley's reply, he grins, and it illuminates his whole body, his face lit up like a chandelier in a cupboard. All the parts of Crowley that were manning the barricades wave a white flag and go the way of the rest of him, jelly-soft and love-struck. 

“I had thought,” Aziraphale says, gesturing to something behind him, “that we could finally make a go of having that picnic?”

Next to the door of the hotel room, a chunky hamper, wicker-woven and held shut with leather straps, sits innocently It's so like the hamper Aziraphale owned at the bookshop, so like the one he packed up ready for their excursion on the Monday after the world didn't end, wanting to start their new life together, that for a moment, Crowley can't speak, but to nod and try not to look too eager about it. 

Crowley's outfit, feeling it needs to rise to the occasion, suddenly finds itself much snazzier than it was expecting for a morning stroll. 

He follows Aziraphale out of the hotel. The angel carries the hamper in a loose grip, swinging and knocking against the side of his leg. It looks deceptively weightless, although knowing Aziraphale's packing, probably nothing of the sort. He uses his other hand to take Crowley's, and that is how they walk down the cobbled roads, old buildings with modern signs leaning in inquisitively. 

It's different than how it's been these past few weeks. Usually, Crowley is the one to brush his hand against Aziraphale's, to slot their fingers together. Aziraphale's advances are subtle and understated, and on the rare occasions he would move first, he would deliberately not look at Crowley while he was doing it, as though prepared for Crowley to pull away if he acknowledged what he'd done. Now, Aziraphale folds his soft fingers into Crowley's grip with all the precision of origami, and he glances at Crowley with such an open look of fondness that Crowley feels his own face redden. He wonders if Aziraphale has been hiding that expression every time he looked away. 

The nice weather has turned up, shooing away the overcast morning and scattered spitting rain and encouraging the flourishing of a bright blue sky marred by lazy clouds. Aziraphale points out the architecture as they go, taking winding roads and offshoots of roads and eventually they come away from the main town centre, and their path curves round to hug the reed-lined walk that settles snug along the path of the river Ouse. There are a few bikes, determined looking runners that are trailing the same route as them, but Aziraphale leads them along until it gets quieter and quieter, the surrounding human traffic turned down to background. There's a secluded spot along the riverbank, and from here it's possible to see the extravagant arch of the Millennium Bridge if they crane their necks a bit. The grass is dotted with daisies, and Aziraphale undoes the straps of the hamper and uncovers a tartan blanket which he shakes out over the grass. He kneels down on it, and pats the space near him, gesturing Crowley to join him. 

Even if it's not the home-made feast he'd planned before, Aziraphale has quite excelled himself. He unloads artisan selections of cheeses and meats, individually picked pastries presented in their own ostentatious cardboard boxes, little sandwiches with grand fillings already sliced into triangles. There's chutneys and preserves and little bundles of grapes only softly bruised from the journey, and there's even some china plates that it looks like Aziraphale's bought from new for the occasion. And then, from some crevice, because surely the hamper wasn't big enough to store all this and still have room, Aziraphale proudly brings forth a bottle of wine, and lord, there's even a dull smear of dust over it, where had he found that. It looks old and expensive and exactly the type of wine Crowley loves. 

“Aziraphale, this is...” Crowley tries to elaborate, but his brain is flitting hither and dither like a bee torn between a few different conversational flowers and unsure where to land. “Wow, this is...” He attempts a third time, allowing his gaze to roam over the man-shaped being next to him, who is currently muttering and patting his pockets for a corkscrew, before he triumphs with a happy 'aha you little rascal!'. “You look... you look really good, angel.” 

It's a rather pathetic sentiment that doesn't reflect half of what he's feeling, but Aziraphale meets his eyes, smiles at him. 

“And you are handsome as ever, my dear,” he says, and leans in, pressing lips to Crowley's cheek chastely, and then settling back on his haunches and expertly uncorking the wine, beginning to pour it into sizeable glasses that he seems to have miracled from nowhere like he hasn't just committed the metaphorical equivalent of throwing a firework into a goldfish pond. 

Crowley's ill-used brain fumbles, and he nearly drops the wine glass when it's offered. 

Because Aziraphale is rarely so open as this. Every gesture has had to fight through a series of careful checks and balances before he seemingly allows himself to do anything, and this was true before Roseley Manor, before years of silence compounded these with a fresh crop of new anxieties to wade through. Crowley knows the angel has never been the more affectionate of the two of them; it's never meant that he loves Crowley any less, and Crowley knows this, knows that Aziraphale finds it more difficult to express these sorts of things out loud, with his body, can never do so carelessly quite like Crowley does. Every adoring glance, every gentle touch is hard won, a victory Crowley savours. 

And now Aziraphale is here, passing him a laden plate of crackers and sliced meats, shyly trying to find every excuse in the book to touch him, and it occurs to Crowley that he's – rather sweetly, if inexpertly – being wooed. 

He pauses, not knowing how to put his words into the correct order, not wanting to offend, to disturb this promising new turn of events. 

“You know you don't need to do all this for me, right?” he says. “The dressing up, the grand gestures, the – the...” he tries to say courting, but he can't quite get it out from behind his teeth. “I... you just being you is perfect, you know. ” He trails off lamely, and pushes a stuffed olive into his mouth so he can't embarrass himself any more. 

“I want to,” Aziraphale says simply, and his smile looks wider in the unrestrained glow of the sunshine. Humour me, just this once?”

And Crowley can't say no to that. 

The picnic is perfect. A veritable feast of culinary joys, all of Crowley's favourites represented and washed down with appreciative sips of the spectacular red wine. Aziraphale keeps finding more morsels to tempt him, and Crowley keeps finding himself being tempted, and it's hard to say no when Aziraphale has rested his fingers almost thoughtlessly on Crowley's hand, when he keeps looking at Crowley like that, with a shining expression unguarded and bold on his face. 

They talk for hours. About their usual things, their old debates, their inside jokes, dredging up well-tread anecdotes and disagreeing on the details, but sometimes, at points while one of them is chewing, filling each other's glasses or simply just admiring the unbroken sky above them, it will dip into deeper territory. 

Crowley finds himself talking about retirement. About keeping a vegetable garden at the back of the house, maybe some bees. Aziraphale considers taking up knitting for the umpteenth time, determined to conquer his handicraft Waterloo and makes grand promises that Crowley will get a scarf out of the endeavour. He wonders aloud if he should open another bookshop, somewhere in the village perhaps, or if he should just store his books in their library and Crowley teases that there isn't much of a distinction between the options. Their conversation is light, warmed in the spring heat, buoyed by the pleasant aftertastes of spices and meats and wine on their tongues, yet there's a weight to it somewhere. It feels less like mindless chatter and more like – Crowley tentatively capitalises the idea – Making Plans. 

They haven't often talked about the future, since they were reunited. It's been more important to treat each day as a minor battle, a small mercy, a fulfilled wish neither of them thought would be granted. When they have talked about the future, it's felt far away, a fun mental exercise to stave off the silences, wondering what it would be like to play human. One day, when everything's settled, we'll have a garden, grow herbs in window pots and keep strawberry plants in the greenhouse. One day, when everything's settled, we'll break out those cookbooks, we'll talk strolls in the local park, we can put those magnets on the fridge and our shoes together by the front door. 

Crowley thinks this might be what settled feels like. 

The afternoon sidles on. There's a brief interruption of a sunny shower, and Aziraphale tuts despairingly and Crowley gestures for a large umbrella to cover them both, and they watch the droplets striking rings on the river, listen to the patter over their head. It lasts less than ten minutes, because British weather has achieved a great neutrality in being able to be changeable in both positive and negative ways, and then Aziraphale brings out a thermos of coffee and a few biscotti. He's not much fond of coffee, has never taken to it, but he's clearly been asking around because whatever roast he's found for this is divine, and Crowley chinks their cups together, letting the smoky bitter tang linger on his tongue. 

After a while, the coffee is finished and Crowley has simply decided that they should continue enjoying the bottle of wine they've polished off, so they do. He hums contentedly, feeling sated and full and with the softest blurry tendrils of the buzz that comes with a good few glasses of alcohol, and leans back on the blanket, one elbow folded under his head, the sunlight playing down on him. At some point, he's not sure when, he forgot to keep his glasses on. He doesn't much find the need, not around Aziraphale. 

Aziraphale's taken off his jacket, messily rolled up the sleeves of his new shirt so they bunch around his elbows. He's sat next to Crowley, cross-legged, and he's found some flat stones to try and skip on the river. 

Crowley can't help himself, and he closes his eyes, moving his fingers to run through Aziraphale's hair, the curls swaying within reach by a helpful breeze. 

“It's gorgeous, he says admiringly, letting his fingers sift through the thick strands like dragging his hand through river water. “What made you decide to grow it out?”

“It was time for a change,” Aziraphale replies, and throws a stone – it flops and sinks with a rather spectacular lack of finesse. “One can get so... trapped in their usual way of doing things. It was the right thing to do.”

His tone has shifted, oddly subdued. Crowley knows he's not talking about his hair. 

He opens one eye to look at Aziraphale, who is giving an interrogatory frown to his wine glass like some cuneiform tablet he expects to reveal great secrets. The glass, in a shocking turn of events, is apparently doing its job of holding liquids rather than giving helpful hints, and Aziraphale looks displeased. 

Crowley opens the other eye. The silence grows thicker. 

“You know,” Aziraphale begins, and he's putting his empty glass down, lying back right next to Crowley, their sides touching, his flyaway hair spilling onto Crowley's shoulder. He threads their hands together ever so carefully. “You know that I'm ever so fond of you, don't you?”

“Hmmm,” Crowley says in agreement. He's not quite sure where this is going. 

“That nothing would bring me more happiness than spending the rest of my days with you?”

Crowley angles his head to look at the angel. Who is gnawing his bottom lip. Who, despite his words, which ring through with sincerity, doesn't exactly look happy right now. 

“I know, Aziraphale,” he says pointedly, wondering if he'll get to the point now or if they'll have to miss the turn-off repeatedly while Aziraphale makes verbal U-turns in frustration. “You've been wooing me all afternoon. It's been nothing short of delightful. But I can't help but sense that instead of showering me with compliments about how much you love me – although if that was your plan, please carry on, don't let me stop you – you're doing a pretty solid job of skirting around what you _actually_ want to say.”

Aziraphale doesn't even have the heart to deny it. He nods wretchedly, and Crowley waits. Silence reigns for a little while longer as Aziraphale's words stage a hard-fought coup. 

“I want to apologise,” he says eventually. 

A frown introduces itself to Crowley's face. 

“What do you mean?” he says. “Why?”

Aziraphale's answer doesn't get there right away. It takes a few back-lanes and the scenic route, but Crowley keeps quiet, because Aziraphale's voice has suddenly become so full of something that has the consistency of storm clouds. 

“I've been thinking,” the angel replies slowly. “About a lot of things. About you and me. About our future together. About my regrets. Well, one gets to thinking as one does and I simply can't shake the idea that...” He's rambling, and he has to reverse slightly. “I keep thinking about how dreadful things must have been for you. All those years when it was only us. The things I said, the... the assumptions I made, the prejudices I held... how uncalled for and unkind they all were...”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says, surprised. This suddenly does not feel like the conversation he wants to be having lying down. He sits up, feeling his back creak, and leans on his palm. His already occupied hand squeezes Aziraphale's at an attempt at reassurance. “Angel, what are you on about? We were on opposite sides, we... we were at _war_. A really slow and stupid and passive-aggressive war, but even so....We were categorically told each other was the enemy. I don't see what you're so worried about. You were never cruel to me. I don't think it's in your nature to be. None of the other angels at the Gates ever gave me the time of day, did they? And all that propaganda they fed you, 'bout sides and demons and ineffability, you don't think any of those things now.”

Aziraphale hears him, but he's sitting up as well. His expression looks pained, clashing with the glow of the sunlight, like Crowley just isn't getting it. 

“But all those things I said,” he powers on insistently. “About you, about love, and sin. About what you were and what I was and how those things defined us.” He fists and loosens his other hand like he's working out a cramp. It's like watching someone very old and very set in their ways loosening the bricks of their world only to find that one of the walls has been holding back a river all this time. “I didn't mean them, you must know that my dear, I never meant them, not really. But that doesn't.... It doesn't _excuse_....It doesn't mean they didn't hurt you. And I wish... I wish to apologise for that.” 

Crowley sighs. He doesn't know what Aziraphale wants him to say. He's never begrudged the people they were before. He hasn't ever thought of forgiving Aziraphale for earlier slights, because it's never crossed his mind that he needed to. 

“We were both wrong about a lot of things,” he says instead. “We both have regrets. It's a very human thing.”

Aziraphale looks at their joined hands. 

“It was always me,” he says. It's almost a whisper, guilty sounding, quiet with shame. “It was always me who pulled away. I... I knew what you wanted from us, Crowley. Before Adam Young, before Tadfield, before all that. I knew what we weren't saying to each other, what we both felt...” He trails off slightly before recovering with an added forward push of frustration. “I was foolish,” he says, voice colouring in an ugly, angry shade of recrimination. “I was _foolish_ and scared, and I-I allowed myself to be – to be manipulated by Heaven. I convinced myself that it was better to believe in something that I knew wasn't right, than to take a chance on trusting something that might have been wrong. We could have had this years ago, we could have been _like this_ if I hadn't...”

Crowley squeezes their hands together tightly to bring him back from wherever he's going.

“Aziraphale,” he says, a bit more firmly than he intended. He fixes the angel with an unyielding look. “I'm sure you've been doing a lot of soul-searching, and that's great, that's healthy, but look, you seem to have me as some sort of martyr to your story. And we're equals, aren't we? It's been just us, the both of us down here for six thousand odd years. I'm not going to _blame_ you. If that's what you're looking for here, then, well, tough.”

His tone loses its edges, wavers and slinks into softness again. “We both followed our sides for our own reasons,” he continues. “And yeah, I knew Heaven was bollocks, and I knew Hell wasn't much of an improvement, but you didn't catch me saying no to them, did you? We both followed orders, we both listened to people we shouldn't have listened to. It's not a sin to have been wrong. And look, now, that's all changed. It's different. Better.”

“I suppose it is,” Aziraphale says quietly, a small smile taking root. 

“For one thing,” Crowley says encouragingly, knocking their shoulders together. “You told Heaven to sod off.”

Aziraphale colours a dusting of pink, and struggles not to look a little proud of that. 

“I did, didn't I?” he says faintly. 

“Do you...” Crowley pushes ahead, because now appears to be the moment when they're asking all the difficult questions, and he pushes this one to the front of the queue. “Do you regret it? What you said?”

“I'd do it again,” Aziraphale says.”Without hesitation.”

“Oh. Right,” Crowley says, and he feels slightly pleased in the same way that the Arctic is slightly chilly. “Well, that's good then,” he finishes, completely failing to sound smooth. 

He feels an urge to put what he thinks into words, but none of them quite capture the intensity of what he wants to communicate. He bends over instead, letting their foreheads rest against the other. 

“I knew what you wanted Aziraphale,” he confesses. The angel doesn't have a monopoly on guilt after all. “I knew what you felt, what we both felt about each other. And I never pushed it.” 

“Because you're a good person,” Aziraphale replies, and Crowley shakes his head slightly, because he's sailed past the point, of course he has, and now he has to flag him back down to bring him back. 

“Angel, I didn't say anything for _hundreds_ of years. But it wasn't because I was considerate, or because I saw your internal struggles and decided to, I don't know, be the nobler man and push aside my own feelings for the sake of your happiness. You... You say that we could have had this, that if you hadn't been so wrapped up in, I don't know, your duty or your responsibilities or your misplaced loyalties, we could have been together, but that's rubbish, angel. If there hadn't been the whole business with the Antichrist, we would have just kept on the way we were going, saying absolutely nothing. And...” he bites at his lip, suddenly feeling a strong desire to have his sunglasses back on so Aziraphale can't read his expression, pushing through it like struggling through a high wind. “...I didn't say anything, I _wouldn't have_ said anything because I was scared, the same as you. Because... look, it'll sound daft, but we've never been.... I'm just saying you weren't wrong, Aziraphale. Demons, demons don't love. Not because they can't, not because of some stupid whim of biology, but they don't. If I let myself be tempted, if I allowed myself to...” he has to swallow for a moment. “... then no amount of explaining could let me get away with it. I couldn't exactly Fall any lower, could I? And so I told myself that if I didn't belong to Hell, I didn't belong anywhere. For the longest time, I would rather have known that I had them than dare to think I could have you.”

Aziraphale hasn't taken his eyes off Crowley's face. He gives a grave nod, like he understands. He might be the only being in the universe who does. 

The conversation goes quiet then, but it's not finished, just slips into a steady lull. Crowley pulls back his head and they sit side by side again. He listens to the lap of the water against the river bank, a distant duck quacking somewhere. Aziraphale rolls a handful of flattened stones in his palm. He stares at the river, rubs his thumb over Crowley's knuckles. The silence is raw, but not in a painful way. It's a silence that's faintly relieved, of two people finally airing things they should have brought into the daylight a long time ago. 

Aziraphale skims a stone with his left-hand, and watches it jump on the water once before sinking. 

“I would, you know,” he murmurs quietly, to the point of being unheard. “Fall. For you.”

Whatever Aziraphale had being going to say next, Crowley hadn't been expecting that. A quiet, very selfish, very human part of him had always assumed that, when it came down to it, he'd always loved Aziraphale a little more than Aziraphale had loved him. 

And here is his angel, dressed up ever so properly in carefully chosen clothes that even now have taken on a scattering of crumbs, holding his hand in the same way archivists and archaeologists and scholars handle very fragile, very old things that they consider priceless and irreplaceable. Failing to skip stones across the slick dark of the river, telling him that he'd deny the grace of Heaven to be with him. 

“You can't...” he splutters, almost angrily although he's not sure why, and his hand twitches as though to pull away. “Aziraphale, you _can't_....”

He doesn't know how to finish that sentence. Say that. Mean that. Want that. 

His words die like starved matches. 

“Angel,” he says, beseeching. “You don't know what you're...”

“Oh, but I do, my love,” Aziraphale replies. He says it with such a desperately steady fondness. It's not showy, there's nothing about it that needs to prove anything. It's got the constancy of sunrise. Crowley could set his watch by that; he could set his life by that sort of faith. “In that place, for fifty years, I was cut off from His grace. And it hurt, terribly. I knew it was there, but it was out of reach, it was denied me, and when it returned it scalded the skin of my soul and I burned. But I was relieved even so, I had missed it so desperately you see, that it was worth the agony to have it back. But you must understand, my dear boy. I... truthfully, I never thought you would find me. But I never doubted that you would look. That you would search for me, that you would try. I never thought Heaven would come for me. I never thought they'd remember me, they'd search for me. I never dreamt of Heaven. I prayed so hard I couldn't breath, but I never prayed for them.”

“I didn't deserve your faith, Aziraphale,” Crowley murmurs, and Aziraphale looks at him as though confused. Moves his hand to cup the side of his face, smoothing a patch of skin with his thumb.

“But you have always been deserving of it,” he replies tenderly, tutting slightly and smiling like Crowley's said something foolish. “I would not have you believe otherwise.”

“Aziraphale...” Crowley says, and he's not ashamed to notice his voice has gone shaky, that it's hard to keep his composure when Aziraphale is gazing upon him like that, like people look at idols or treasures, exuding such a strong sense of _love_ that even Crowley's duller senses can feel it. 

“And if they came back,” Aziraphale presses on simply, “if they asked me to return, and if I was to Fall, I need you to know that I would, my – my dearest love.” He settles another one of those chaste kisses at the hinge of Crowley's lips, printing over the corner like a seal. “I couldn't bear it if you thought yourself anything less than everything to me.”

Crowley's fingers are threading through Aziraphale's hair, bringing their lips together properly then. Because there's knowing something and hearing it out loud, there's having a man-shaped being share your bed and share your home and buy magnets for your non-existent fridge, and then there's listening to him say what you've been holding as gospel truth in your own chest, listening to him when he tells you something like that. 

He wants to say it back, tell Aziraphale using their adopted language that he loves him, but his lips are busy and he doesn't need to. Aziraphale knows. 

Aziraphale kisses in an intense, scattered way, like his mind's halfway ahead of his body. Crowley scrunches his fingers gently against Aziraphale's scalp, tangled in the curls of his hair, places a hand at the side of his body where his stomach joins to his hip. That seems to do the trick, ground him, slow their motions, and Aziraphale hums and Crowley's lips swallow the sound and for a long time there's nothing at all in the world but this. 

The sun warms their backs, the river trickles on. Crowley suddenly feels too exposed out here, like they should be somewhere quieter more secluded.

Eventually, his brain and a minute later, his mouth, manages to croak out. 

“Want to go back to the hotel?”

Aziraphale's pulled back, his pupils blown wide in a fetchingly flustered way, and he nods earnestly, babbling a 'quite right, yes, of course, absolutely...' and almost kicks over his wine glass in his eagerness to stand. They pack up and tidy away the remnants of their feast, and Aziraphale keeps shooting contented little looks at Crowley, and Crowley keeps smiling back and being drawn into small, pecking kisses that threaten to linger, and neither of them have quite the self control they usually pride themselves on. 

They get back to the hotel in half the time it took them to get there, and Crowley is not ashamed to admit he dropped the key card trying to get it out of his pocket, and Aziraphale's laugh was a ringing undignified snort. Crowley makes a face and sticks his tongue out, and then they're inside the room and the door is locked with a wave, and Aziraphale trips over the clothes bag he left near the door and Crowley can't help but give a vengeful chuckle. 

They stand in the centre of the room, slotted against each other for the longest time. Everything slows, narrows, lingering like dust motes in sunlight. Aziraphale angles Crowley's face up to his, and brushes their noses together before he presses his lips to his cheek, his forehead, the dip where his chin meets his neck. Each one precise and careful, individually treated as though each move is incredibly vital, pursued with such sincerity that it makes it difficult for Crowley to remember he has things he wants to do too. 

It suddenly feels terribly important for Aziraphale to _see_ him. To _know_ him. 

Crowley isn't talking about sex. Maybe he'll suggest it to Aziraphale one day, and they can try it in the same way they'd try a new restaurant together, they'd listen to a concert together. No, it is suddenly critically a priority that Aziraphale sees him, what he is. He's unfolding his wings with a shudder, their expanse blocking out the light of the room, darking it to shadow, and he hisses with something like joy when Aziraphale trails his fingers through the curtain of his feathers. And Aziraphale has caught on to his intent, his own frazzled wings curling around, enclosing them together, pressing them close, and Crowley's dizzy with the tender presses Aziraphale is adorning him with, the way he's holding their bodies together, suspended from the rest of the world. 

And carefully, trustingly, Aziraphale looks at Crowley and he starts to shine. 

Aziraphale's original form is not human. Neither is Crowley's for that matter. And neither of them really know what they are now, an unpredicted amalgamation of ethereal or occult or human, held in constructed bodies that they've taken as their own. As Crowley moves against Aziraphale, he feels the angel's edges blur slightly, like something seen too close to make out clearly, a light lapping against him like water against a riverbank. Aziraphale keeps his human form, but his outline softens, spilling out like a hallway light under a door. His glow blends against Crowley, and as he kisses him again, the light sweeps around him, into him like sunlight seeping into his pores. 

And Crowley lets his own form unwind, like he's loosening his tie, like he's popping a button to let himself breath a bit more. His own greedy light, that is both like and unlike smoke, presses to meet Aziraphale, and they let their edges bleed together like two oceans meeting, and they shine. 

Crowley wonders for a surreal moment as he basks in the radiant glow of the light that is both him and not him, if this is what it's always like, but then remembers that no one has ever done this quite like them before. He strokes his fingers through Aziraphale's hair, feels the warmth settle in his lungs, fill him until breathing feels needless, wasteful, sees Aziraphale arch and bask and savour the light he is giving off in kind. 

This is what they look like. The things that they are, the essence that makes them up, wrapped up in the bodies that are theirs, the very human lives they're making for each other. They move languidly, trade touches and gestures and whispers as they feel the essence of each other soak in, submerging and mingling and overwhelming the other in a radiant, glorious synthesis. The light that is all at once _aziraphale_ and _crowley_ and _them_ combined, washing over their hard places that are still learning to soften, the parts of them scraped down and worn by a hundred small disappointments, a hundred fears and terrors, the parts of them bolstered by a hundred thoughtless reassurances. The way they have spent years holdings each other up, inviting each other in, in their own ways, to the only home they've both had, that they've made and are making together. The light and their bodies and their feathers touch slow, moving softly like wind rustling over grass. There's finally no need for urgency. They speak, or make sound, or mutter nothings, but it's mostly noise for the sake of it because finally there's nothing else they need to say. 

After a time, a long time, the light wavers and they begin to separate, unmerging with an unhurried farewell of feather-light touches. They settle back into themselves, leaned up against each other, and it's a while before either of them can bear to break the fragile bubble of silence. 

They don't put their wings away. 

They sit down on one bed, Aziraphale with his back propped up by pillows, Crowley with his head cushioned by Aziraphale's lap.

“What shall we do tomorrow?” Aziraphale asks. It's not night, but neither of them feel in a rush to reintroduce themselves to the outside world. 

“I thought the tower in the morning,” Crowley says, “maybe the Viking Museum if it's open.”

Aziraphale hums with faint, indulgent interest, and plays mindlessly with Crowley's artfully styled hair, listening as Crowley continues: “Then I'll treat you to lunch, and I thought at some point we might stop by the railway museum.” Crowley timed it perfectly. Aziraphale doesn't fuss or scrunch his nose up in dismissal, he nods, and it's unlikely he heard him, still buzzing as he is with happiness. 

“And then after that?”

“Whatever we want.”

Aziraphale hums again. Perhaps thinking of where they might go next, the things they still have to see. 

“And then we go home.”

“And then we go home,” Crowley agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the wonderful and kind reviews you guys left. This fandom is the best. x
> 
> (For the curious, this is [the outfit](https://images.app.goo.gl/b2ZfmcdrSLCvxYH97) that Aziraphale gets dressed up in).
> 
> AND LOOK! AT THIS! BEAUTIFUL! VERSION OF AZIRAPHALE IN THE [OUTFIT](https://twitter.com/calypsolemon/status/1148811832381120520/) by calypsolemon on Twitter.

**Author's Note:**

> A follow on from the previous work, which was mostly hurt and a little comfort, and really an excuse to write soft things under the guise of a road trip sequel.


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